Russia has intensified strikes on Ukraine, with the highest number of drones and missiles launched in a single night yet.

At least 12 people, including three children, were killed and dozens injured, Ukrainian officials said.

The attack was the second large-scale assault on the country in 48 hours, coming a day after the Ukrainian capital Kyiv suffered one of the heaviest assaults since the start of the Russian invasion.

Saturday’s overnight strikes come as Russia ignores calls for a ceasefire.

Rescuers were working in more than 30 cities and villages after the “massive” strike, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement on Sunday morning.

“Russia is dragging out this war and continues to kill every day,” he said.

“The world may go on for a weekend, but the war continues, despite weekends and weekdays. This cannot be ignored.”

Ukraine is again urging its allies to apply more pressure on Moscow to engage in a ceasefire.

“Without really strong pressure on the Russian leadership, this cruelty cannot be stopped,” he added, calling for fresh sanctions.

Zelensky said “America’s silence will only encourage Putin” – an apparent effort to exert pressure on US President Donald Trump who has said the Russian leader is interested in ending the war.

Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and Moscow currently controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory.

This includes Crimea – Ukraine’s southern peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.

In terms of the numbers of drones and missiles launched, Saturday night was the highest yet.

Russia is able not only to just manufacture them at a faster rate, but they are also evolving. Shahed drones are now being packed with more explosives and improved technology to evade detection.

Ukraine’s Air Force said that since 20:40 on Saturday local time (17:40 GMT), Russia had carried out strikes using 367 missiles of various types, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and drones.

The air force said it had shot down 45 cruise missiles and neutralised 266 UAVs, with most regions in Ukraine affected and hits recorded in 22 locations.

Deaths were reported in several regions.

Russia’s defence ministry said it had inflicted damage on targets including military airfields, ammunition depots and electric warfare stations, claiming damage across 142 areas.

According to Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs, Ihor Klymenko, 13 regions were attacked, with more than 70 people injured, 80 residential buildings damaged, and 27 fires recorded.

He called it a “combined, ruthless strike aimed at civilians”.

Of the 12 people killed, three were children aged eight, 12 and 17 in the Zhytomyr region, Ukraine’s state emergencies service DSNS said.

Klymenko said they were from the same family and their parents were in hospital.

In the Kyiv region, four people were killed and 16 injured, including three children, DSNS said.

In Kyiv, local officials reported 11 injuries, multiple fires and damage to residential buildings, including a dormitory.

Hundreds of people headed to the city’s deep metro stations for shelter. The din of drones filled the air, occasionally punctuated by the booms of air defences, or the moments of impact. Several fires were reported.

A BBC colleague messaged to say a block of flats had been destroyed, just a five minute drive from where she lived.

The strikes come as the capital marks its annual Kyiv Day holiday.

In Russia, the defence ministry said 110 Ukrainian drones were destroyed and intercepted over 12 Russian regions and the Crimea peninsula between midnight and 0700 local time.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported that 12 drones heading towards the capital were shot down.

He added that emergency services crews were deployed to assess damage caused by falling drone debris.

In the Tula region, just south of Moscow, drone wreckage crashed in the courtyard of a residential building, smashing windows in a number of apartments, local governor Dmitriy Milyaev said.

No-one was injured, he added.

Sunday is also the third and final day of a major prisoner of war exchange between the two sides, and after this weekend, there is even less hope it will lead to further co-operation.

On Friday, Ukraine and Russia each handed over 390 soldiers and civilians in the biggest prisoner exchange since Russia launched its full-scale assault in February 2022.

On Saturday, Zelensky announced that another 307 Ukrainian prisoners had returned home as part of an exchange deal with the Kremlin.

And on Sunday, Ukraine and Russia each confirmed 303 of their soldiers had returned home – bringing the total over the three days to 1,000 prisoners each.

The swap follows the first face-to-face talks between the two sides in three years, which took place in Turkey.

Earlier this week, Trump and Putin had a two-hour phone call to discuss a US-proposed Ukraine ceasefire deal.

Trump said he believed the call had gone “very well”, and added that Russia and Ukraine will “immediately start” negotiations toward a ceasefire and “an end to the war”.

However, Putin has only said Russia would work with Ukraine to craft a “memorandum” on a “possible future peace”, and has not accepted a 30-day ceasefire.

Andriy Portnov’s murder in a Madrid suburb may have been shocking, but it has not exactly triggered an outpouring of grief in Ukraine.

The controversial former official had just dropped his children off at the American School when he was shot several times in the car park.

The image of his lifeless body lying face down in gym kit marked the end of a life synonymous with Ukrainian corruption and Russian influence.

Ukraine’s media have been discussing the 51-year-old’s frequent threats to journalists, as well as his huge influence under the country’s last pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych.

“A man who called for the killing of political opponents suddenly got what he wanted from others,” observed reporter Oleksandr Holubov. News website Ukrayinska Pravda even called him “the devil’s advocate”.

Rare words of restraint came from Portnov’s once political rival Serhiy Vlasenko, an MP, who said: “You can’t kill people. When discussing someone’s death, we must remain human.”

Portnov was controversial and widely disliked. The motives for his murder may seem evident, but his death has still left unanswered questions.

Before entering Ukrainian politics, Portnov ran a law firm. He worked with then-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko until 2010, before defecting to Yanukovych’s camp when he won the election.

“It was a big story of betrayal,” remembers Ukrainian journalist Kristina Berdynskykh. “Because Tymoshenko was a pro-Western politician, and Yanukovych pro-Russian.”

The adviser became the country’s first deputy head of the Presidential Office and set up a national criminal code in 2012. For him, his critics say, his ascent was less about politics, and more about power and influence.

“He was just a good lawyer, everyone knew he was very smart,” Kristina tells me.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Ukraine inherited a judicial system in desperate need of reform. Mykhailo Zhernakov, a legal expert and head of the Dejure Foundation believes Portnov remoulded it in order for the government to cover up illegal schemes, and to mask Russian attempts to control the country.

“He was the kingpin, mastermind and architect of this corrupt legal system designed to serve the pro-Russian administration at the time,” he says.

Over a decade, Portnov would sue journalists who wrote negative stories about him through the courts and judges he controlled. His attempts to control the judicial system would lead to him being sanctioned by the US.

At the time, Washington accused the adviser of placing loyal officials in senior positions for his own benefit, as well as “buying court decisions”.

Portnov later pursued activists who took part in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution, which toppled Viktor Yanukovych from power, and forced him to escape the country to Russia.

“He used sexual threats,” says Oksana Romaniuk who remembers her and other journalists’ interactions with Portnov well.

As director of the Institute of Mass Information, she monitors free speech in Ukraine.

Whenever a damning report was published, the reaction was familiar and consistent. “When people exposed his corruption, he accused them of fake news,” she says.

“Even when journalists had documents and testimonies backing up the allegations, it was impossible to win the lawsuits in court. It was impossible to defend yourself. It was a rotten system.”

Andriy Portnov eventually settled in Moscow after his old boss Yanukovych fled in 2014. Investigative reporter Maksym Savchuk subsequently investigated his ties to Moscow, as well as his extensive property portfolio there.

“He responded with words I don’t want to quote, derogatory ones about my mother,” he remembers. “It’s a trait of his character; he is a very vindictive person.”

Even after leaving Ukraine, Portnov still tried to influence Ukrainian politics by taking control of pro-Kremlin TV channel NewsOne.

He returned in 2019, only to flee again with the full-scale invasion in 2022.

The irony of Portnov eventually settling in Spain and sending his children to a prestigious American school has not been lost on many.

Alongside the undisguised delight in Portnov’s death, there has been endless speculation over who was responsible.

“It could have been the Russians because he knew so many things,” suggests legal expert Mykhailo Zhernakov.

“He was involved in so many shady Russian operations it could be them or other criminal groups. He managed to annoy a lot of people,” he says.

Despite the motives being clearer on this side of the border, Ukrainian security sources appear to be trying to distance themselves from the killing.

Kyiv has previously carried out assassinations in Russian-occupied territory and in Russia itself, but not in Spain.

Some Spanish media reports suggest his murder was not political, but rather over “economic reasons or revenge”.

“You can imagine how many people need to be interrogated in order to narrow down the suspects,” thinks Maskym Savchuk. “Because this person has a thousand and one enemies.”

In Ukraine, Portnov is seen as someone who helped Russia form the foundations for its invasion. A once general dislike of him has only been intensified since 2022.

Despite this, Mykhailo Zhernakov hopes his death is also an opportunity for wider judicial reforms.

“Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean his influence has,” he warns. “Because many of the people he appointed or helped get jobs are still in the system.”

A decade ago, a portrait of the British monarch caused a row in Canadian politics. Now, the King is being invited to deliver the Speech from the Throne. What’s changed?

In 2011, shortly after forming a majority Conservative government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper caused a national uproar when he sought to emphasise Canada’s ties to the British monarchy. In one example, he replaced two artworks by a Quebec painter with a portrait of the Queen.

Some rebuked the gesture as being out of touch with modern times. Canada has, throughout its 157-year-old history, sought increasing independence from the British monarchy, while still remaining a part of the Commonwealth.

When Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau succeeded Harper four years later, the Queen’s portrait went down, the Quebec paintings, back up.

Fast forward to 2025, and a paradoxical shift has occurred in Canada’s relationship with the Crown. In a transparent show of Canada’s sovereignty and independence against threats from US President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Mark Carney – a Liberal – has invited King Charles the III to open the 45th Canadian parliament.

• King Charles uses symbols to show support for Canada
• The strategy behind Carney’s invite to the King

The move is “a huge affirmation and statement about the uniqueness of Canada and its traditions,” Justin Vovk, a Canadian royal historian, told the BBC – “a theatrical display that is meant to show what makes Canadians separate from Americans” and not, as Trump has often repeated, a “51st state”.

Both countries are former British colonies, but America’s founding fathers took a different path and severed all formal connections to the Crown nearly 250 years ago.

Canada’s separation from the monarchy has been more gradual, and its ties have never been completely broken. Canada’s parliamentary system is modelled after Britain’s Westminster system. The British monarch is still formally the head of state, but their duties are often carried out by their Canadian representative, called the governor general.

Loyalty to the Crown was seen as important to Canada’s politicians in the 19th Century who wanted to maintain separation from the US, said Canadian royal historian and commentator Carolyn Harris.

That later changed in the 1960s, as Quebec – Canada’s majority French-speaking province – began to assert its own distinct identity and threatened separation. This led to an era of politicians like Lester B Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau who worked to untangle Canada from its British colonial past.

In 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau repatriated Canada’s constitution, giving full legislative power to the federal government and the provinces, and removing it from British parliament.

Ms Harris noted that Canada remained a constitutional monarchy throughout these periods. What fluctuated, however, was how much the prime minister of the day chooses to embrace that connection.

Carney’s invitation to King Charles III signals that his government will be one that is much more supportive of the Crown, Mr Vovk said, marking “a very different tone” from previous Liberals.

A British monarch has not delivered Canada’s throne speech since 1977, and has not opened a brand new session of parliament since 1957, making the King’s upcoming visit a truly rare occasion.

It comes at a consequential time for Canada.

Carney heavily campaigned on standing up to Trump, after the US president spent months undermining Canada’s sovereignty by saying it would be better off as a US state.

Trump also imposed a series of tariffs that have threatened Canada’s economic stability, given that the US is its largest trade partner by far.

When announcing the visit last month, Carney called it “a historic honour that matches the weight of our times”.

He added that the King’s visit “clearly underscores the sovereignty of our country”.

Both historians, Mr Vovk and Ms Harris, noted that the bulk of Canada’s modern population is indifferent to the British monarchy. Some are even critical of it.

The coronation of King Charles III in 2023 made way for fresh scrutiny of the Crown’s historic mistreatment of indigenous people in Canada, and questions on whether the new monarch will move towards reconciliation.

Quebec politicians are also still calling for Canada to cut ties with the monarchy. On Friday, the separatist Bloc Québécois party said it will again seek to scrap the need for elected officials to swear allegiance to the King.

Some Canadians will be intrigued by the pomp and pageantry of the King’s visit, Mr Vovk said, but its chief purpose is to send a political message from Canada to the world.

It is also a way for Prime Minister Carney to improve the relationship with Trump, who is famously a fan of the British monarchy and its history.

“Strengthening the relationship with the monarchy puts a stamp on legitimacy that transcends individual parties and the current political climate,” Mr Vovk said. “Politicians come and go, but the monarchy has always remained.”

It also works to tie Canada closer to Europe – a key objective of Prime Minister Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England, who has spoken about the need for Canada to find new allies as it navigates its changing relationship with the US.

The visit is notable for the Crown, too.

It will be the King’s first to Canada as reigning monarch. He and the Queen had intended to visit last year, but cancelled their plans due to his cancer diagnosis.

The palace has promised a throne speech that will “mark a significant moment between the Head of State and the Canadian people”.

And while it will be a short trip – the King and Queen will arrive Monday morning and depart Tuesday evening – the palace said they hope the trip will be “an impactful one”.

An Israeli air strike on Gaza hit the home of a doctor and killed nine of her 10 children, the hospital where she works in the city of Khan Younis says.

Nasser hospital said one of Dr Alaa al-Najjar’s children and her husband were injured, but survived.

Graeme Groom, a British surgeon working in the hospital who operated on her surviving 11-year-old boy, told the BBC it was “unbearably cruel” that his mother, who spent years caring for children as a paediatrician, could lose almost all her own in a single missile strike.

Israel’s military said its aircraft had struck “a number of suspects” in Khan Younis on Friday, and “the claim regarding harm to uninvolved civilians is under review”.

A video shared by the director of the Hamas-run health ministry and verified by the BBC showed small burned bodies lifted from the rubble of a strike in Khan Younis.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its “aircraft struck a number of suspects who were identified operating from a structure adjacent to IDF troops in the area of Khan Younis”.

“The Khan Younis area is a dangerous war zone. Before beginning operations there, the IDF evacuated civilians from this area for their own safety,” the Israeli military said.

In a general statement on Saturday, the IDF said it had struck more than 100 targets across Gaza over the past day.

The health ministry said at least 74 people had been killed by the Israeli military over the 24 hour-period leading up to about midday on Saturday.

Dr Muneer Alboursh, director of the health ministry, said on X that the al-Najjars’ family house was hit minutes after Dr al-Najjar’s husband Hamdi had returned home after driving his wife to work.

Dr Alboursh said the eldest of Dr al-Najjar’s children was aged 12.

Mr Groom said the children’s father was “very badly injured”, in a video posted on the Instagram account of another British surgeon working at Nasser hospital, Victoria Rose.

He told the BBC that the father had a “penetrating injury to his head”.

He said he had asked about the father, also a doctor at the hospital, and had been told he had “no political and no military connections and doesn’t seem to be prominent on social media”.

He described it as an “unimaginable” situation for Dr Alaa al-Najjar.

Mr Groom said the surviving 11-year-old boy, Adam, was “quite small” for his age.

“His left arm was just about hanging off, he was covered in fragment injuries and he had several substantial lacerations,” he told the BBC.

“Since both his parents are doctors, he seemed to be among the privileged group within Gaza, but as we lifted him onto the operating table, he felt much younger than 11.”

“Our little boy could survive, but we don’t know about his father,” he added.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency, said on Telegram on Friday afternoon that his teams had recovered eight bodies and several injured from the al-Najjar house near a petrol station in Khan Younis.

The hospital initially posted on Facebook that eight children had been killed, then two hours later updated that number to nine.

Another doctor, Youssef Abu al-Rish, said in a statement posted by the health ministry that he had arrived to the operating room to find Dr al-Najjar waiting for information about her surviving son and tried to console her.

In an interview recorded by AFP news agency, relative Youssef al-Najjar said: “Enough! Have mercy on us! We plead to all countries, the international community, the people, Hamas, and all factions to have mercy on us.

“We are exhausted from the displacement and the hunger, enough!”

On Friday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that people in Gaza were enduring what may be “the cruellest phase” of the war, and denounced Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid imposed in March.

Israel partially lifted the blockade earlier this week. Israeli military body Cogat said 83 more trucks carrying flour, food, medical equipment pharmaceutical drugs entered Gaza on Friday.

The UN has repeatedly said the amount of aid entering is nowhere near enough for the territory’s 2.1 million people – saying between 500 to 600 trucks a day are needed – and has called for Israel to allow in much more.

The limited amount of food that trickled into Gaza this week sparked chaotic scenes, with armed looters attacking an aid convoy and Palestinians crowding outside bakeries in a desperate attempt to obtain bread.

A UN-backed assessment this month said Gaza’s population was at “critical risk” of famine.

People in Gaza have told the BBC they have no food, and malnourished mothers are unable to breastfeed babies.

Chronic shortages of water are also worsening as desalination and hygiene plants are running out of fuel, and Israel’s expanding military offensive causes new waves of displacement.

Israel has said the blockade was intended to put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages still held in Gaza.

Israel has accused Hamas of stealing supplies, which the group has denied.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas’s cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 53,901 people, including at least 16,500 children, have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry.

North Korea has detained three shipyard officials over an accident during the launch of a new warship on Wednesday, state media say.

Parts of the 5,000-tonne destroyer’s bottom were crushed during the launch ceremony, tipping the vessel off balance.

An investigation into the incident, which North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un described as a “criminal act”, is ongoing.

KCNA, North Korea’s official news agency, identified those detained as the chief engineer of the northern Chongjin shipyard where the destroyer was built, as well as the construction head and an administrative manager.

The report said that the three were “responsible for the accident”.

On Friday, KCNA said the manager of the shipyard, Hong Kil Ho, had been summoned by law enforcers.

Satellite images showed the vessel lying on its side covered by large blue tarpaulins, and a portion of the vessel appeared to be on land.

North Korea’s state media did not mention any casualties or injuries at the time, downplaying the damage.

KCNA reported that there were no holes on the ship’s bottom – contrary to initial reports.

“The hull starboard was scratched and a certain amount of seawater flowed into the stern section,” the agency said.

Kim said on Thursday the accident was caused by “absolute carelessness, irresponsibility and unscientific empiricism”.

He added that those who made “irresponsible errors” would be dealt with at a plenary meeting next month.

It is not clear what punishment they might face, but the authoritarian state has a woeful human rights record.

It is uncommon for North Korea to publicly disclose local accidents – though it has done this a handful of times in the past.

This particular accident comes weeks after North Korea unveiled a similar 5,000-tonne destroyer, the Choe Hyon.

Kim had called that warship a “breakthrough” in modernising North Korea’s navy and said it would be deployed early next year.

Founded in 1600 as a trading enterprise, the English East India company gradually transformed into a colonial power.

By the late 18th Century, as it tightened its grip on India, company officials began commissioning Indian artists – many formerly employed by the Mughals – to create striking visual records of the land they were now ruling.

A Treasury of Life: Indian Company Paintings, c. 1790 to 1835, an ongoing show in the Indian capital put together by Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), features over 200 works that once lay on the margins of mainstream art history. It is India’s largest exhibition of company paintings, highlighting their rich diversity and the skill of Indian artists.

Painted by largely unnamed artists, these paintings covered a wide range of subjects, but mainly fall into three categories: natural history, like botanical studies; architecture, including monuments and scenic views of towns and landscapes; and Indian manners and customs.

“The focus on these three subject areas reflects European engagements with their Indian environment in an attempt to come to terms with all that was unfamiliar to Western eyes,” says Giles Tillotson of DAG, who curated the show.

“Europeans living in India were delighted to encounter flora and fauna that were new to them, and ancient buildings in exotic styles. They met – or at least observed – multitudes of people whose dress and habits were strange but – as they began to discern – were linked to stream of religious belief and social practice.”

Beyond natural history, India’s architectural heritage captivated European visitors.

Before photography, paintings were the best way to document travels, and iconic Mughal monuments became prime subjects. Patrons soon turned to skilled local artists.

Beyond the Taj Mahal, popular subjects included Agra Fort, Jama Masjid, Buland Darwaza, Sheikh Salim Chishti’s tomb at Fatehpur Sikri (above), and Delhi’s Qutub Minar and Humayun’s Tomb.

The once-obscure and long-anonymous Indian artist Sita Ram, who painted the tomb, was one of them.

From June 1814 to early October 1815, Sita Ram travelled extensively with Francis Rawdon, also known as the Marquess of Hastings, who had been appointed as the governor general in India in 1813 and held the position for a decade. (He is not to be confused with Warren Hastings, who served as India’s first governor general much earlier.)

The largest group in this collection is a set of botanical watercolours, likely from Murshidabad or Maidapur (in present-day West Bengal).

While Murshidabad was the Nawab of Bengal’s capital, the East India Company operated there. In the late 18th century, nearby Maidapur briefly served as a British base before Calcutta’s (now Kolkata) rise eclipsed it.

Originally part of the Louisa Parlby Album – named after the British woman who compiled it while her husband, Colonel James Parlby, served in Bengal – the works likely date to the late 18th Century, before Louisa’s return to Britain in 1801.

“The plants represented in the paintings are likely quite illustrative of what could be found growing in both the well-appointed gardens as well as the more marginal spaces of common greens, waysides and fields in the Murshidabad area during the late eighteenth century,” writes Nicolas Roth of Harvard University.

“These are familiar plants, domestic and domesticated, which helped constitute local life worlds and systems of meaning, even as European patrons may have seen them mainly as exotica to be collected.”

Another painting from the collection is of a temple procession showing a Shiva statue on an ornate platform carried by men, flanked by Brahmins and trumpeters.

At the front, dancers with sticks perform under a temporary gateway, while holy water is poured on them from above.

Labeled Ouricaty Tirounal, it depicts a ritual from Thirunallar temple in Karaikal in southern India, capturing a rare moment from a 200-year-old tradition.

By the late 18th Century, company paintings had become true collaborations between European patrons and Indian artists.

Art historian Mildred Archer called them a “fascinating record of Indian social life,” blending the fine detail of Mughal miniatures with European realism and perspective.

Regional styles added richness – Tanjore artists, for example, depicted people of various castes, shown with tools of their trade. These albums captured a range of professions – nautch girls, judges, sepoys, toddy tappers, and snake charmers.

“They catered to British curiosity while satisfying European audience’s fascination with the ‘exoticism’ of Indian life,” says Kanupriya Sharma of DAG.

Most studies of company painting focus on British patronage, but in south India, the French were commissioning Indian artists as early as 1727.

A striking example is a set of 48 paintings from Pondicherry – uniform in size and style – showing the kind of work French collectors sought by 1800.

One painting (above) shows 10 men in hats and loincloths rowing through surf. A French caption calls them nageurs (swimmers) and the boat a chilingue.

Among the standout images are two vivid scenes by an artist known as B, depicting boatmen navigating the rough Coromandel coast in stitched-plank rowboats.

With no safe harbours near Madras or Pondicherry, these skilled oarsmen were vital to European trade, ferrying goods and people through dangerous surf between anchored ships and the shore.

Company paintings often featured natural history studies, portraying birds, animals, and plants – especially from private menageries.

As seen in the DAG show, these subjects are typically shown life-size against plain white backgrounds, with minimal surroundings – just the occasional patch of grass. The focus remains firmly on the species itself.

Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG, says the the latest show proposes company paintings as the “starting point of Indian modernism”.

Anand says this “was the moment when Indian artists who had trained in courtly ateliers first moved outside the court (and the temple) to work for new patrons”.

“The agendas of those patrons were not tied up with courtly or religious concerns; they were founded on scientific enquiry and observation,” he says.

“Never mind that the patrons were foreigners. What should strike us now is how Indian artists responded to their demands, creating entirely new templates of Indian art.”

“A lot of people ask me: ‘Father Moses, how can I increase my manliness to absurd levels?'”

In a YouTube video, a priest is championing a form of virile, unapologetic masculinity.

Skinny jeans, crossing your legs, using an iron, shaping your eyebrows, and even eating soup are among the things he derides as too feminine.

There are other videos of Father Moses McPherson – a powerfully-built father of five – weightlifting to the sound of heavy metal.

He was raised a Protestant and once worked as a roofer, but now serves as a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in Georgetown, Texas, an offshoot of the mother church in Moscow.

ROCOR, a global network with headquarters in New York, has recently been expanding across parts of the US – mainly as a result of people converting from other faiths.

In the last six months, Father Moses has prepared 75 new followers for baptism in his church of the Mother of God, just north of Austin.

“When my wife and I converted 20 years ago we used to call Orthodoxy the best-kept secret, because people just didn’t know what it was,” he says.

“But in the past year-and-a-half our congregation has tripled in size.”

During the Sunday liturgy at Father Moses’s church, I am struck by the number of men in their twenties and thirties praying and crossing themselves at the back of the nave, and how this religion – with traditions dating back to the 4th century AD – seems to attract young men uneasy with life in modern America.

Software engineer Theodore tells me he had a dream job and a wife he adored, but he felt empty inside, as if there was a hole in his heart. He believes society has been “very harsh” on men and is constantly telling them they are in the wrong. He complains that men are criticised for wanting to be the breadwinner and support a stay-at-home wife.

“We are told that’s a very toxic relationship nowadays,” Theodore says. “That’s not how it should be.”

Almost all the converts I meet have opted to home-school their offspring, partly because they believe women should prioritise their families rather than their careers.

Father John Whiteford, an archpriest in the ROCOR from Spring, north of Houston, says home-schooling ensures a religious education and is “a way of protecting your children”, while avoiding any talk about “transgenderism, or the 57 genders of the month or whatever”.

Compared to the millions of worshippers in America’s evangelical megachurches, the numbers of Christian Orthodox are tiny – only about one percent of the population. That includes Eastern Orthodoxy, as practised across Russia, Ukraine, eastern Europe and Greece, and the Oriental Orthodox from the Middle East and Africa.

Founded by priests and clergy fleeing the Russian Revolution in 1917, ROCOR is seen by many as the most conservative Orthodox jurisdiction in the US. Yet this small religious community is a vocal one, and what’s unfolding within it mirrors broader political shifts, especially following President Donald Trump’s dramatic pivot toward Moscow.

The true increase in the number of converts is hard to quantify, but data from the Pew Research Centre suggests Orthodox Christians are 64% male, up from 46% in 2007.

A smaller study of 773 converts appears to back the trend. Most recent newcomers are men, and many say the pandemic pushed them to seek a new faith. That survey is from the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), which was established by Russian monks in Alaska in the late 18th Century and now has more than 700 parishes, missions, communities, monasteries, and institutions in the US, Canada and Mexico which identify as Russian Orthodox.

Professor Scott Kenworthy, who studies the history and thought of Eastern Orthodox Christianity – particularly in modern Russia – says his OCA parish in Cincinnati “is absolutely bursting at the seams”.

He’s attended the same church for 24 years and says congregation numbers remained steady until the Covid lockdown. Since then, there has been constant flow of new inquirers and people preparing to be baptised, known as catechumens.

“This is not just a phenomenon of my own parish, or a few places in Texas,” Prof Kenworthy says, “it is definitely something broader.”

The digital space is key in this wave of new converts. Father Moses has a big following online – when he shares a picture of a positive pregnancy test on his Instagram feed he gets 6,000 likes for announcing the arrival of his sixth child.

But there are dozens of other podcasts and videos presented by Orthodox clergy and an army of followers – mainly male.

Father Moses tells his congregation there are two ways of serving God – being a monk or a nun, or getting married. Those who take the second path should avoid contraception and have as many children as possible.

“Show me one saint in the history of the Church who ever blessed any kind of birth control,” Father Moses says. As for masturbation – or what the church calls self-abuse – the priest condemns it as “pathetic and unmanly”.

Father Moses says Orthodoxy is “not masculine, it is just normal”, while “in the West everything has become very feminised”. Some Protestant churches, he believes, mainly cater for women.

“I don’t want to go to services that feel like a Taylor Swift concert,” Father Moses says. “If you look at the language of the ‘worship music’, it’s all emotion – that’s not men.”

Elissa Bjeletich Davis, a former Protestant who now belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church in Austin, is a Sunday school teacher and has her own podcast. She says many converts belong to “the anti-woke crowd” and sometimes have strange ideas about their new faith – especially those in the Russian Church.

“They see it as a military, rigid, disciplinary, masculine, authoritarian religion,” Elissa says. “It’s kind of funny. It’s almost as if the old American Puritans and their craziness is resurfacing.”

Buck Johnson has worked as a firefighter for 25 years and hosts the Counterflow podcast.

He says he was initially scared to enter his local Russian Orthodox Church as he “looks different, covered in tattoos”, but tells me he was welcomed with open arms. He was also impressed the church stayed open throughout the Covid lockdown.

Sitting on a couch in front of two huge TV screens at his home in Lockhart, he says his newfound faith is changing his view of the world.

“Negative American views on Russia are what worry me,” Buck says. He tells me the mainstream, “legacy” media presents a distorted picture of the invasion of Ukraine.

“I think there’s a holdover from the boomer generation here in America that lived through the Cold War,” Buck says, “and I don’t quite grasp why – but they say Russia’s bad.”

The head of the Russian Church in Moscow, Patriarch Kirill, has doggedly backed the invasion of Ukraine, calling it a Holy War, and expressing little compassion for its victims. When I ask Archpriest Father John Whiteford about Russia’s top cleric, who many see as a warmonger, he assures me the Patriarch’s words have been distorted.

Footage and photographs of Putin quoting Bible verses, holding candles during services in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and stripping down to his swim trunks to plunge into icy water at Epiphany, seem to have struck a chord. Some – in America and other countries – see Russia as the last bastion of true Christianity.

Nearly a decade ago, another Orthodox convert turned priest from Texas, Father Joseph Gleason, moved from America to Borisoglebskiy, a village four hours’ drive north of Moscow, with his wife and eight children.

“Russia does not have homosexual marriage, it does not have civil unions, it is a place where you can home-school your kids and – of course – I love the thousand-year history of Orthodox Christianity here,” he told a Russian video host.

This wispy-bearded Texan is in the vanguard of a movement urging conservatives to relocate to Russia. Last August, Putin introduced fast-track shared values visa for those fleeing Western liberalism.

Back in Texas, Buck tells me he and his fellow converts are turning their backs on instant gratification and American consumerism.

“We’re thinking of things long term,” Buck says, “like traditions, love for your family, love for you community, love for neighbours.

“I think that orthodoxy fits us well – and especially in Texas.”

It was supposed to be a defining, catalytic moment for French society.

Horrific, but unmissable. Unignorable.

The seaside town of Vannes, in southern Brittany, had carefully prepared a special venue and a separate overflow amphitheatre for the occasion.

Hundreds of journalists were accredited for a process that would, surely, dominate headlines in France throughout its three-month duration and force a queasy public to confront a crime too often shunted to the sidelines.

Comparisons were quickly made with – and expectations tied to – last year’s Pelicot mass rape trial in southern France and the massive global attention it garnered.

Instead, the trial of France’s most prolific known paedophile, Joel Le Scouarnec – a retired surgeon who has admitted in court to raping or sexually assaulting 299 people, almost all of them children – is coming to an end this Wednesday amid widespread frustration.

“I’m exhausted. I’m angry. Right now, I don’t have much hope. Society seems totally indifferent. It’s frightening to think [the rapes] could happen again,” one of Le Scouarnec’s victims, Manon Lemoine, 36, told the BBC.

Ms Lemoine and some 50 other victims, stung by an apparent lack of public interest in the trial, have formed their own campaign group to pressure the French authorities, accusing the government of ignoring a “landmark” case which exposed a “true laboratory of institutional failures”.

The group has questioned why a parliamentary commission has not been set up, as in other high-profile abuse cases, and spoken of being made to feel “invisible”, as if “the sheer number of victims prevented us from being recognised.”

Some of the victims, most of whom had initially chosen to testify anonymously, have now decided to reveal their identities in public – even posing for photos on the courthouse steps – in the hope of jolting France into paying more attention and, perhaps, learning lessons about a culture of deference that helped a prestigious surgeon to rape with impunity for decades.

The crimes for which Le Scouarnec is on trial all occurred between 1998 and 2014.

“It’s not normal that I should have to show my face. [But] I hope that what we’re doing now will change things. That’s why we decided to rise up, to make our voices heard,” said Ms Lemoine.

So, what has gone wrong?

Were the horrors too extreme, the subject matter too unremittingly grim or simply too uncomfortable to contemplate?

Why, when the whole world knows the name of Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot, has a trial with significantly more victims – child victims abused under the noses of the French medical establishment – passed by with what feels like little more than a collective shudder?

Why does the world not know the name Joel Le Scouarnec?

“The Le Scouarnec case is not mobilising a lot of people. Perhaps because of the number of victims. We hear the disappointment, the lack of wide mobilisation, which is a pity,” said Maëlle Nori, from feminist NGO (All of Us).

Some observers have reflected on the absence in this case of a single, totemic figure like Gisèle Pelicot, whose public courage caught the public imagination and enabled people to find some light in an otherwise bleak story.

Others have reached more devastating conclusions.

“The issue is that this trial is about sexual abuse of children.

There’s a virtual on this topic globally, but particularly in France. “We simply don’t want to acknowledge it,” Myriam Guedj-Benayoun, a lawyer representing several of Le Scouarnec’s victims, told me.

In her closing arguments to the court, Ms Guedj-Benayoun condemned what she called France’s “systemic, organised silence” regarding child abuse.

She spoke of a patriarchal society in which men in respected positions like medicine remained almost beyond reproach and pointed to “the silence of those who knew, those who looked the other way, and those who could have – should have – raised the alarm”.

The depravity exposed during the trial has been astonishing – too much for many to stomach.

The court in Vannes has heard in excruciating detail how Le Scouarnec, 74, wallowed in his paedophilia, carefully detailing each child rape in a succession of black notebooks, often preying on his vulnerable young patients while they were under anaesthetic or recovering from surgery.

The court has also been told of the retired surgeon’s growing isolation, and of what his own lawyer described as “your descent into hell”, in the final decade before he was caught, in 2017, after abusing a neighbour’s six-year-old daughter.

By the end, alone in a filthy house, drinking heavily and ostracised by many of his relatives, Le Scouarnec was spending much of his time watching violent images of child rape online, and obsessing over a collection of lifelike child-sized dolls.

“I was emotionally attached to them… They did what I wanted,” Le Scouarnec told the court in his quiet monotone.

A few blocks from the courthouse, in an adapted civic hall, journalists have watched the proceedings unfold on a television screen. In recent days, the seats have begun to fill up and coverage of the trial has increased as it moves towards a close.

Many commentators have noted how the Le Scouarnec trial, like the Pelicot case, has exposed the deep institutional failings which enabled the surgeon to continue his rapes long after they could have been detected and stopped.

Dominique Pelicot had been caught “upskirting” in a supermarket in 2010 and his DNA quickly linked to an attempted rape in 1999 – a fact that, astonishingly, wasn’t followed up for a whole decade.

At Le Scouarnec’s trial a succession of medical officials have explained – some ashamedly, others self-servingly – how an overstretched rural healthcare system chose, for years, to ignore the fact that the surgeon had been reported by America’s FBI in 2004 after using a credit card to pay to download videos of child rapes on his computer.

“I was advised not to talk about such and such a person,” said one doctor who’d tried to sound the alarm.

“There is a shortage of surgeons, and those who show up are welcomed like the messiah,” explained a hospital director.

“I messed up, I admit it, like the whole hierarchy,” a different administrator finally conceded.

Another connection between the Pelicot and Le Scouarnec cases is what they’ve both revealed about our understanding – or lack of understanding – of trauma.

Without warning or support, Gisèle Pelicot had been abruptly confronted by police with the video evidence of her own drugging and rapes.

Later, during the trial, some defence lawyers and other commentators sought to minimise her suffering by pointing to the fact that she’d been unconscious during the rapes – as if trauma only exists, like a wound, when its scar is visible to the naked eye.

In the Le Scouarnec case, French police appear to have gone about searching for the paedophile’s many victims in a similarly brusque manner, summoning people for an unexplained interview and then informing them, out of the blue, that they’d been listed in the surgeon’s notebooks.

The reactions of Le Scouarnec’s many victims have varied widely. Some have simply chosen not to engage with the trial, or with a childhood experience of which they have no memory.

For others, news of the abuse has affected them profoundly.

“You’ve entered my head, it’s destroying me. I’ve become a different person – one I don’t recognise,” said a victim, addressing Le Scouarnec in court.

“I have no memories and I’m already damaged,” said another.

“It turned me upside down,” a policeman admitted.

And then there is a different group of people who – not unlike Gisèle Pelicot – have found that knowledge of their abuse has been revelatory, enabling them to make sense of things they had not previously understood about themselves or their lives.

Some have connected their childhood abuse to a general sense of unhappiness, or poor behaviour, or failure in life.

For others, the links have been much more specific, helping to explain a litany of mysterious symptoms and behaviours, from a fear of intimacy to repeated genital infections and eating disorders.

“With my boyfriend, every time we have sex, I vomit,” one woman revealed in court.

“I had so many after-effects from my operation. But no-one could explain why I had this irrational fear of hospitals,” said another victim, Amélie.

Some have described the trial itself as being like a group therapy session, with victims bonding over shared traumas which they’d previously believed they were suffering alone.

“This trial is like a clinical laboratory involving 300 victims. I sincerely hope it will change France. In any case it will change the victims’ perception of trauma and traumatic memory,” said the lawyer, Ms Guedj-Benayoun.

Despite her concerns about the lack of public interest, Manon Lemoine said the trial had helped the victims “to rebuild ourselves, to turn a page. We lay out our pain and our experiences and we leave it behind [in the courtroom]. So, for me, really, it was liberating.”

Having confessed to his crimes, Le Scouarnec will inevitably receive a guilty verdict and will almost certainly remain in prison for the rest of his life.

Two of his victims took their own lives some years before the trial – a fact which he acknowledged in court with the same penitent but formulaic apology that he’s offered to everyone else.

Meanwhile, some activists remain hopeful that the case will prove to be a turning point in French society.

“Compared to the Pelicot trial… we can see we don’t talk very much about the Le Scouarnec case. We need to unite. We have to do this, otherwise nothing will happen, and the Le Scouarnec trial will have served no purpose. I was also a victim as a child. We’re obliged to react and to organise ourselves,” said Arnaud Gallais, a child rights campaigner and founder of the Mouv’Enfants NGO.

A more wary assessment came from the lawyer, Ms Guedj-Benayoun.

“Now, there is a very important standoff between those who want to denounce child sexual violence and those who want to cover it up, and this standoff is taking place today in this trial. Who will win?” she wondered.

A man slept outside in a car park overnight in Kenya with his wife and infant son in January, consumed by confusion and disbelief.

The family, refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), had been expecting a flight to the US for resettlement in just hours’ time.

But after US President Donald Trump suspended the US refugee programme just two days before the family’s scheduled departure, the man was told their flight to America was abruptly cancelled – less than 24 hours before take-off.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” the man, who asked to go by the name of Pacito to protect his identity, told the BBC.

He had already moved his family from their home, sold his furniture and most of their belongings, and prepared for a new life in America. They remain in Kenya, which is a safer prospect than the DRC, where they fled conflict.

They represent just three of the roughly 120,000 refugees who had been conditionally approved to enter the US, but who now wait in limbo due to the refugee pause.

Trump’s move signalled a major change in the approach that was followed by successive US leaders. Under former President Joe Biden, over 100,000 refugees came to the US in 2024 – the highest annual figure in nearly three decades.

Since entering office in January, Trump has moved quickly to deliver on his campaign promise of an “America first” agenda that has involved dramatically restricting routes by which migrants can come to the US.

The effort has also included an ambitious deportation programme under which people have been deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador against a judge’s orders, as well as revoking visas from over a thousand university students, and offering illegal immigrants a sum of $1,000 each to “self-deport”.

The White House has defended its actions by suggesting that many of those being forced from the country are either violent criminals or threaten America’s interests.

But exceptions to the policies have been made for a select few.

The president signed an executive order in February that opened the refugee pathway exclusively to Afrikaners – white South Africans who he claimed were victims of “racial discrimination”.

A plane carrying 59 of them landed at an airport just outside Washington DC earlier this month, in a ceremonious greeting that included the deputy secretary of state.

“It’s not fair,” Pacito commented. “There are 120,000 refugees who went through the whole process, the vetting, the security, the medical screenings. We’ve waited for years, but now these (Afrikaners) are just processed in like three months.”

The situation has left Pacito feeling stuck. Since he has sold all of the equipment that he needed to work in his field of music production, for the past few months he has struggled to find odd jobs to earn money for his family. “It’s kind of hard,” he said.

• Trump ambushes S African leader with claim of Afrikaners being ‘persecuted’
• Is there a genocide of white South Africans as Trump claims?
• ‘I didn’t come here for fun’ – Afrikaner defends refugee status in US

Trump has further justified his decision to accept Afrikaners as refugees in the US because he says they face “a genocide” – a message that has been echoed by Elon Musk, his South African-born close ally.

Such claims have circulated for years, though are widely discredited, and have been denied by South Africa.

However, the call has taken on new animus – particularly among right-wing groups in the US – ever since a law was passed in South Africa in January that allowed the government to seize land from white landowners “when it is just and equitable and in the public interest”. The post-apartheid-era law was meant to address frustrations around South Africa’s disproportionate land ownership; the country’s white population is roughly 7% but owns roughly 72% of farmland.

Though South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said no land has been taken under the new law, days after it was passed, Trump ordered the US to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the country. A diplomatic feud followed.

The fraying relationship was laid bare on Wednesday during a tense White House meeting between the pair. Trump ambushed Ramaphosa on live TV with claims of white “persecution” – an allegation Ramaphosa emphatically rejected.

Analysts have described the broader foreign policy of Trump’s second term as isolationist, with numerous moves made to cut foreign aid and to disentangle the US from foreign conflicts, in addition to reducing immigration.

Trump has also terminated tens of billions of dollars in global aid contracts – including funds that supported lifesaving HIV/Aids programmes in South Africa. He has justified the cuts by saying his team identified fraud within the aid spending.

The moves appear in stark contrast to the White House’s decision to fast-track the arrival of white South Africans – a fact that has been critiqued by refugee advocacy groups.

“Every case of protection should be based on credible evidence of persecution, and the central question here is about fairness and equal treatment under the law,” Timothy Young from the non-profit organisation Global Refuge told the BBC.

“So if one group can access humanitarian pathways, then so should Afghan allies, persecuted religious minorities and the thousands of other families who face serious threats and who meet the legal criteria for refugee status,” Mr Young said.

• How a US freeze upended global aid in a matter of days
• Trump to end protected status for Afghans

Among its other moves, the Trump administration has chosen not to renew the temporary protected status for Afghans in the US, saying “Afghanistan has had an improved security situation” and a “stabilising economy”. They now face deportation.

South Africa does not release crime figures based on race, but the latest figures revealed that 6,953 people were murdered in the country between October and December 2024.

Of these, 12 were killed in farm attacks. Of the 12, one was a farmer, usually white, while five were farm dwellers and four were employees, who were likely to have been black.

Meanwhile, in the DRC, thousands of civilians have been killed by armed militias in recent years, and nearly 100,000 more displaced, according to UN figures.

Pacito fled the DRC on foot in 2016, recalling “guns everywhere I looked” at the time, and “no peace”. He said family members of his wife had been killed.

Among the others who see the US as an increasingly unlikely place to resettle as refugees is the Hammad family, who are from Gaza but are now living in Egypt.

“After what happened with Trump, I think it will be impossible,” Amjad Hammad told the BBC.

He and his family had applied for the US’s green card lottery in 2024 but found out in May they had been denied.

He expressed confusion about Trump’s concern for the plight of white South Africans over and above other groups.

“What are the Palestinians facing, if the people in South Africa are facing a genocide?” he asked.

More than 53,000 people have been killed across Gaza since 7 October 2023, when Israel launched a campaign to destroy Hamas – the Palestinian armed group that launched a cross-border attack on southern Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

The confusion voiced by Mr Hammad is similar to the views of Pacito, whose hopes of resettling in the US were dashed in January.

Since then, he has been left effectively homeless in Nairobi, drifting from place to place to wherever someone will accept him and his family for a few days.

“Sometimes we get food. Sometimes we don’t,” he said. “We’ve been struggling very badly.”

The policy changes on the US side give him little hope that he will be accepted by Trump, but the alternative of heading back across Africa to his home country is unimaginable. “I can’t go back,” he said.

I was planning an ordinary afternoon out – bags packed, ready to roll – when I bounded downstairs and was hit by a jolt of disbelief.

The space where my cargo bike should have been was empty, and the double lock that had bolted it to my apartment wall was hacked.

My daughter darted between the other bikes, convinced someone must have moved it, but no, it was gone.

With cycling deeply embedded in daily life here in the Hague and across the Netherlands – part of the “Dutch DNA”, as we say – I have no car, so used my bike for everything, from the school run to a shopping trip.

This was no ordinary bicycle. My colleague Kate Vandy and I retrofitted it to become a mobile broadcasting studio, which we named the Bike Bureau. I started “Dutch News from the Cycle Path”, a reporting series born on the school run after my daughter asked me: “Why don’t you just tell people the news now?”

The bike allowed me to reach breaking news scenes and broadcast live from anywhere, my daughter by my side, showing that working motherhood could be visible, joyful and real.

It opened doors to collaborations, awards and a community of people who saw themselves in our story.

I have zero expectation of getting the bike back, and searching for it has proven fruitless. I called the police immediately and they opened a case, but closed it shortly afterwards because of a lack of evidence that would help find the thief.

People online and in my local community have rallied round to try to find it since I put out an appeal. Neighbours asked if I was okay, telling me they loved to see me enjoy their bike lanes and see their city from my foreigner’s perspective.

But why, my daughter asked, do so many people care that our bike was stolen?

Colleagues and friends responded to my Instagram Reel about the theft. Legendary BBC camerawoman Julie Ritson called my bike a blueprint for the future of journalism. Others said it was a relatable life-hack that showed how one person can manage motherhood and career, and inspired them to rethink what’s possible with a cargo bike.

It was solar-powered, cutting the need for satellite trucks with heavy equipment and the pollution that mode of transport brings.

Research last year from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows audiences are not only interested in climate change news – they are particularly engaged by stories that highlight individuals taking empowering action in response to the crisis.

Some people have expressed surprise that “this kind of thing” would happen in the Netherlands. What they may not realise is that bike theft is endemic here. Last year, more than 86,000 bikes were reported stolen in the Netherlands, up 1,000 compared to the year before, and 10,000 more than in 2022, according to police figures. Authorities say a rise in reports may have contributed to this.

Most bikes stolen are stripped for parts or sold on. My e-cargo bike cost nearly €5,000 (£4,200) – more than our old car which I sold.

I paid for the bike, so the BBC has undergone no financial loss.

What it really bought me was independence – and in a way, losing it is like losing a friend. Aside from the impact on my own lifestyle, that bike gave my daughter a magical, nature-filled childhood: picnics in the dunes, detours to see highland cows, fairy lights in winter, breezy rides to the beach in summer.

The theft has sparked conversations about urban safety, cycling infrastructure, and the burdens mothers still carry. But it’s also a testament to the community we’ve built and the power of sharing authentic stories from the saddle.

I might not get my bike back, but no one can steal what it gave us all.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has previously been put in prison and banned from film-making in his home country, spoke out against the restrictions of the regime after winning the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Panahi picked up the prestigious Palme d’Or for It Was Just an Accident, described by BBC Culture as “a furious but funny revenge thriller that takes aim at oppressive regimes”.

He was cheered as he urged fellow Iranians to “set aside” differences and problems.

“What’s most important now is our country and the freedom of our country,” he said. “Let us join forces. No-one should dare tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, what we should do, or what we should not do.”

Panahi’s last spell in prison, from which he was freed in 2023, was for protesting against the detention of two fellow film-makers who had been critical of the authorities.

His trip to Cannes was his first appearance at an international festival in 15 years, after being subject to a long travel ban.

It Was Just an Accident was shot in secret and based partly on Panahi’s own experiences in prison.

“Before going to jail and before getting to know the people that I met there – and hearing their stories, their backgrounds – the issues I dealt with in my films were totally different,” the director told the Hollywood Reporter.

“It’s really in this context (…) with this new commitment that I had felt in prison, that I had the idea, the inspiration for this story.”

The film tells the tale of five ordinary Iranians who are confronted with a man they believed tortured them in jail.

The characters were inspired by conversations he had with other prisoners and “stories that they told me about, the violence and the brutality of the Iranian government”, the director added.

Panahi spent seven months of a six-year sentence in jail before being released in February 2023.

He was previously sentenced to six years in 2010 for supporting anti-government protests and creating “propaganda against the system”. He was released on conditional bail after two months, and was banned from making movies or travelling abroad.

He has vowed to return to Tehran after the festival despite the risks of prosecution.

“As soon as I finish my work here I will go back to Iran,” he told reporters in Cannes. “And I will ask myself what’s my next film going to be.”

The Guardian’s review described It Was Just an Accident as Panahi’s “most emotionally explicit film yet: a film about state violence and revenge, about the pain of tyranny that co-exists with ostensible everyday normality”.

“It’s another very impressive serio-comic film from one of the most distinctive and courageous figures in world cinema,” the paper’s critic Peter Bradshaw wrote.

Variety said Panahi had transformed “from understated humanist to open critic of the Iranian regime, as revealed in his punchy new political thriller”.

Panahi was presented with the Palme d’Or by French actress Juliette Binoche, who is this year’s Cannes jury president, and Australian actress Cate Blanchett.

Introducing the award, Binoche said cinema and art are “provocative” and mobilise “a force that transforms darkness into forgiveness, hope and new life”.

“That is why we have chosen for the Palme d’Or It Was Just an Accident by Jafar Panahi.”

In her introduction, Blanchett said: “I applaud the festival’s understanding that cinema creates openings for wider social conversations to take place.”

The award ceremony went ahead as planned despite a five-hour power cut that local officials put down to suspected attacks on a substation and electricity pylon.

Panahi, 64, has now completed the rare feat of winning the top prizes from the Cannes, Berlin and Venice film festivals – and could now be in line for recognition in Hollywood.

Four of the past five Palme d’Or winners have been nominated for the Oscar for best picture.

However, It Was Just an Accident is unlikely to be nominated for the Oscar for best international feature. Films must have a cinematic release in their country of origin to be eligible for that prize, and Panahi’s films are banned in Iran.

A 37-year-old cryptocurrency investor appeared in court on Saturday after being arrested for allegedly kidnapping and torturing an Italian tourist in a Manhattan home, according to media reports.

John Woeltz was arraigned in New York Criminal Court at 9:00 EST (14:00 BST) on charges of kidnapping with intent to collect ransom, assault, unlawful imprisonment and other counts, court records show.

A second person, 24-year-old Beatrice Folchi, was arrested on Saturday in connection to the case, according to the BBC’s US partner CBS News.

The pair were taken into custody after the victim managed to escape a home in SoHo, where he was allegedly tortured and bound for weeks, police said.

The BBC has contacted the New York Police Department, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and Mr Woeltz’s attorney for comment.

The 28-year-old victim, who has not been named, was taken to the hospital and is in stable condition, police have said. Officers found several Polaroid photos of the victim being tied up and tortured, as well as firearms, in the luxury townhome, according to reports.

The victim told police he came to New York from Italy on 6 May, and that upon arriving at the suspect’s house, Mr Woeltz took his passport and allegedly held him captive until he escaped on Friday morning.

According to a criminal complaint obtained by ABC News, the victim told police that Mr Woeltz and another person beat him and hanged him off a ledge when he refused to provide his bitcoin password.

Mr Woeltz is a crypto investor from Kentucky and has been renting the SoHo home for between $30,000 (£22,000) and $40,000 per month, according to CBS News.

A power cut in southern France caused by suspected sabotage has disrupted screenings on the final day of the Cannes Film Festival.

About 160,000 homes in the city of Cannes and surrounding areas lost power early on Saturday, before supply was restored in the afternoon.

Officials said an electricity substation had been set on fire and a pylon at another location damaged.

Organisers of the international film festival say the closing ceremony will go ahead as planned as they have an alternative power supply.

Prosecutors say a first power cut occurred when a substation in the village of Tanneron, which supplies Cannes, was attacked by arsonists in the early hours.

At about 10:00 (08:00 GMT) the legs of an electricity pylon near the town of Villeneuve-Loubet were cut, triggering a second outage.

In Cannes, shops and restaurants struggled to operate.

“Another hour and I’ll throw everything away,” Laurent Aboukrat, who owns Cannes’ Jamin restaurant, told the AFP news agency. He said his fridges had been off since the morning.

“Cannes is in a total slowdown, meltdown, there’s no coffee anywhere, and I think the town has run out of croissants, so this is like crisis territory,” Australian producer Darren Vukasinovic told Reuters news agency.

Several screenings were interrupted by the cut in the morning, before festival organisers were able to switch to private generators.

Saturday is the last day of the festival. French actress Juliette Binoche and her jury are set to announce the winner of the Palme d’Or – the highest prize awarded at the festival.

Lucy Connolly’s 51-word online post in the wake of the Southport killings led her to jail and into the centre of a row over free speech.

For some, the 31-month jail term imposed for inciting race hate was “tyrannical”, while one commentator said Connolly was a “hostage of the British state”, and another that she was “clearly a political prisoner”.

Court of Appeal judges, however, this week refused to reduce her sentence.

Asked about her case in Parliament, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said sentencing was “a matter for the courts” and that while he was “strongly in favour of free speech”, he was “equally against incitement to violence”.

Rupert Lowe, the independent MP for Great Yarmouth, said the situation was “morally repugnant” and added: “This is not the Britain I want to live in.”

Others said her supporters wanted a “right to be racist”.

In July last year, prompted by a false rumour that an illegal immigrant was responsible for the murder of three girls at a dance workshop in Southport, Connolly posted online calling for “mass deportation now”, adding “set fire to all the… hotels [housing asylum seekers]… for all I care”.

Connolly, then a 41-year-old Northampton childminder, added: “If that makes me racist, so be it.”

At the time she had about 9,000 followers on X. Her message was reposted 940 times and viewed 310,000 times, before she deleted it three and a half hours later.

In October she was jailed after admitting inciting racial hatred.

Three appeal court judges this week ruled the 31-month sentence was not “manifestly excessive”.

Stephen O’Grady, a legal officer with the Free Speech Union (FSU), said the sentence seemed “rather steep in proportion to the offence”.

His organisation has worked with Connolly’s family since November and funded her appeal.

Mr O’Grady said Connolly “wasn’t some lager-fuelled hooligan on the streets” and pointed to her being a mother of a 12-year-old daughter, who had also lost a son when he was just 19 months old.

He said there was a “difference between howling racist abuse at somebody in the street and throwing bricks at the police” and “sending tweets, which were perhaps regrettable but wouldn’t have the same immediate effect”.

Connolly’s case was also “emblematic of wider concerns” about “increasing police interest in people’s online activity”, Mr O’Grady said.

The FSU had received “a slew of queries” from people who were “very unsure” about “the limits of what they can they can say online”, he said, and who feared “the police are going to come knocking on the door”.

“There’s an immense amount of police overreach,” he added.

He cited the example of a retired special constable detained after challenging a pro-Palestine supporter online, a case the FSU took on.

Responding to Mr O’Grady’s claim, a National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesperson said that Article 10 of the Human Rights Act “protects a person’s right to hold opinions and to express them freely” and that officers received training about the act.

They added: “It remains imperative that officers and staff continue to receive training commensurate with the demands placed upon them.”

After the appeal was dismissed, Connolly’s husband, Conservative town councillor Raymond Connolly, said she was “a good person and not a racist” and had “paid a very high price for making a mistake”.

Her local Labour MP, Northampton South’s Mike Reader, said he had “big sympathy” for Connolly and her daughter, but there was no justification for accusing the police of “overreach”.

He said: “I want the police to protect us online and I want the police to protect us on the streets and they should be doing it equally.”

It was a “fallacy” and “misunderstanding of the world” if people did not “believe that the online space is as dangerous for people as the streets,” he added.

“We’re all attached to our phones; we’re all influenced by what we see, and I think it’s right that the police took action here.”

In his sentencing remarks, Judge Melbourne Inman said Connolly’s offence was “category A” – meaning “high culpability” – and that both the prosecution and her own barrister agreed she “intended to incite serious violence”.

For Reader, this showed “they weren’t arguing this was a silly tweet and she should be let off – her own counsel agreed this was a serious issue”.

At her appeal, Connolly claimed that while she accepted she intended to stir up racial hatred, she always denied trying to incite violence.

But Lord Justice Holroyde said in a judgement this week the evidence “clearly shows that she was well aware of what she was admitting”.

Sentencing guidelines for the offence indicate a starting point of three years’ custody.

While the prosecution argued the offence was aggravated by its timing, “particularly sensitive social climate”, the defence argued the tweet had been posted before any violence had started, and that Connolly had “subsequently attempted to stop the violence after it had erupted”.

The judgement also highlighted other online posts from Connolly that the judges said indicated her “view about illegal immigrants”.

Four days before the Southport murders, she responded to a video shared by far-right activist Tommy Robinson showing a black man being tackled to the ground for allegedly performing a sex act in public.

Connolly posted: “Somalian, I guess. Loads of them,” followed by a vomiting emoji.

On 3 August, responding to an anti-racism protest in Manchester, she wrote: “I take it they will all be in line to sign up to house an illegal boat invader then. Oh sorry, refugee.

“Maybe sign a waiver to say they don’t mind if it’s one of their family that gets attacked, butchered, raped etc, by unvetted criminals.”

The FSU said she was likely to be eligible for release from August, after serving 40% of her sentence.

Some, including Mr O’Grady, argued her jail term was longer than punishments handed to criminals perceived to have committed “far worse” crimes.

Reform UK’s Mark Arnull, the leader of West Northamptonshire Council, said it was not for him “to pass comment on sentences or indeed discuss individual cases”.

But he added: “It’s relatively easy to understand why constituents in West Northamptonshire question the proportionality of Lucy’s sentence when they see offenders in other high-profile and serious cases walk free and avoid jail.”

The issue for writer and activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu was that “those who have committed worse crimes” should “spend more time in jail, not less time for Lucy Connolly”.

Dr Mos-Shogbamimu added: “It’s not ‘freedom of speech without accountability’. She didn’t tweet something that hurt someone’s feelings; she tweeted saying someone should die.”

In her view, those making Connolly a “flag-bearer or champion” for free speech were asking for “the right to be racist”.

Free speech advocate Mr O’Grady said “no-one is arguing for an unfettered ‘right’ to incite racial hatred”.

Connolly’s case was about “proportionality”, he added, and “the sense that online speech is increasingly being punished very harshly compared to other offending… such as in-person violent disorder”.

As a footballer, Jay Emmanuel-Thomas seemed destined for greatness. But a drug-smuggling conviction has left his career and reputation in tatters. How did things unravel so dramatically for a player once tipped for the top?

Hailed by legendary Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger as a footballer who could “play anywhere”, Emmanuel-Thomas was marked out early on as having elite potential.

Imposing, technically gifted and surprisingly agile, the striker appeared to have the world at his feet.

But a career that promised so much at Arsenal faltered and saw him spend years flitting between the second and third tiers of English football.

In 2020 he moved to play in Scotland and was still plying his trade north of the border when, on 18 September, he was arrested at his home in Gourock, near Glasgow.

Sixteen days earlier, Border Force officers had stopped two women at London Stansted Airport and found drugs in their cases.

It was not a minor haul; they were staring at cannabis with a street value of £600,000.

How did it get there? The evidence soon led detectives to Emmanuel-Thomas.

Wind back a decade and a half, and things were very different.

It is 26 May 2009, and Arsenal’s latest batch of academy talents can barely contain their excitement.

The young prospects, including Jack Wilshere and Francis Coquelin, have just won the FA Youth Cup.

One player in particular has stood out: their 16-year-old captain, Emmanuel-Thomas, who has scored in every round of the competition.

“These young men have a very bright future indeed,” remarked one commentator.

But despite going on to make five first-team appearances, it was not quite to be for Emmanuel-Thomas.

He was shipped out on several loans before leaving the north London club for Ipswich Town.

It was a move that excited supporters in Suffolk, who were keen to see what the former Arsenal starlet could produce.

However, 71 games and eight goals later, Emmanuel-Thomas had not quite made the mark fans hoped for, and he moved to Bristol City in a player exchange deal.

Here, he helped the Robins secure promotion to the Championship and became something of a cult hero, scoring 21 goals in his first season.

A move to Queens Park Rangers followed, with subsequent loan spells at MK Dons and Gillingham.

But in 2019, Emmanuel-Thomas accepted a transfer to a Thai-based team that would alter the course of his life.

It is believed he was tempted into the country’s drugs underworld while playing for PTT Rayong, a club that folded in the same year.

Despite later moves to an Indian side and several Scottish outfits, including Aberdeen, Emmanuel-Thomas never shook off the criminal connections he made.

By the time he took a six-month contract at Greenock Morton, a 40-minute drive from Glasgow, the game was almost up.

As he lined up for them against Queens Park on 14 September, he would have surely known the law was about to catch up with him.

The women arrested at Stansted were his 33-year-old girlfriend, Yasmin Piotrowska, and her friend Rosie Rowland, 28.

Emmanuel Thomas, by then 33, appeared in court charged with orchestrating the attempted importation of drugs, and was sacked by his club.

Detectives discovered he had duped Ms Piotrowska, from north-west London, and Ms Rowland, from Chelmsford, into travelling to Thailand with the promise of £2,500 in cash and an all-expenses-paid trip.

Their job? To bring home two suitcases each, filled with what they were assured was gold, Chelmsford Crown Court heard.

They flew business class from Bangkok, landing in Essex via Dubai.

Unknown to them, they were smuggling in cannabis with a street value of £600,000, vacuum-packed inside the four cases.

The pair were stopped and arrested by Border Force officers, before being charged with drug importation offences.

With the pair in custody, and Emmanuel-Thomas later remanded, police probed how the drugs made it to the UK.

They soon found the player was the intermediary between suppliers in Thailand and dealers in the UK, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA).

With the footballer’s encouragement, the women had also made a near-identical trip in July, having been made similar promises of cash and a lavish holiday.

On his way to custody, Emmanuel-Thomas even told NCA officers: “I just feel sorry for the girls.”

His first court hearing in September was told he carried out “extensive research” into flights and directions, including which airports the women had been going to.

David Philips, a senior NCA investigator, said “organised criminals like Emmanuel-Thomas” used persuasion and payment to get people to do their dirty work.

“But the risk of getting caught is very high and it simply isn’t worth it,” he added.

During several court appearances, Emmanuel-Thomas, of Cardwell Road, Gourock, strenuously denied attempting to import cannabis.

However, he changed his plea to guilty at the start of May and restrictions on reporting this were lifted on Wednesday.

Charges against both Ms Piotrowska and Ms Rowland were dropped after the prosecution revealed they had been tricked by Emmanuel-Thomas.

It followed what David Josse KC described as a “very thorough investigation”.

Emmanuel-Thomas appeared via video link from HMP Chelmsford at his latest court hearing.

When he returns to court for sentencing, on a date still to be confirmed, it will not be his first time in the spotlight.

But it will be for very different reasons to the day he lifted that trophy aloft in 2009.

When Chris Davies’s daughter first begged him for a hamster, he wasn’t exactly thrilled.

But eight-year-old Lily, after hours of research, managed to convince her dad they were not just “starter pets” and to welcome one into their home.

The NHS nurse bought Popcorn, a hamster he said he knew there was “something different” about from the beginning.

But nothing could have prepared Chris for the “surreal” impact the rodent would have on his life, eventually leading him to the woman he will soon marry.

Not long after bringing Popcorn home, Chris’ life took an expected turn as he had a “sudden” break-up.

“I was broken after,” he said. Yet during those lonely times, it was Popcorn who offered him unexpected support.

“I thought I’d just be more open-minded and see what this animal was about.”

Chris was surprised to find that Popcorn behaved more like a loyal puppy than a rodent.

“He was following me like a dog,” he said. “I got him on the sofa with me, and he fell asleep on my chest. I couldn’t believe it.”

For Chris, who struggles with anxiety, Popcorn soon became a source of calm and connection.

“It was just a really beautiful thing. It was mindfulness.

“Being a nurse in the NHS, some days are quite hard and it’s really stressful, but Popcorn would just calm me down.”

Lily and other family members began encouraging Chris to post videos of Popcorn’s behaviour online.

“I was kind of anxious at first,” Chris said. “How many blokes do you see lying on a sofa with a hamster?”

But almost as soon as Chris began posting videos of Popcorn on TikTok, they took off.

More than140,000 fans were charmed by Popcorn’s unusual personality, his affection and his bond with Chris and Lily.

He became, as Chris lovingly described him, their “micro-dog”.

What followed was a bizarre set of events no one could have been predicted, Chris said.

As Popcorn gained popularity online, Chris and Lily wrote a book together about the impact that the little critter had on their family, which was then published in May 2024.

Meanwhile, Chris’ social posts of Popcorn had prompted a comment from a fellow Cardiffian, Carrie, telling him his content was “cute”.

The pair got chatting, soon discovering mutual passions, a shared love for animals and even the same profession.

“We were living only a mile apart, but we’d never bumped into each other,” Chris said. “It was crazy.”

Chris and Carrie met in person a few months later and when Carrie held Popcorn, Chris said, it was like a something “clicked into place”.

The family, which has now grown to include Carrie and her children as well, sadly lost Popcorn in the summer of 2023.

But fast forward to today and Chris and Carrie are engaged, set to marry this December.

Their wedding cake will even feature a small tribute to Popcorn, with his name written at the bottom.

“Without him it wouldn’t have happened, you know. He was cupid, in a way.” Chris said.

Though Popcorn has been gone for a few years now, his impact remains immeasurable.

For Chris, he was more than just a pet. “There’s never be another Popcorn,” he said. “He was just a one-off.”

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and his delegation went to Washington this week hoping for a boost and a reset after months of acrimony with the Donald Trump administration.

Instead they got brutal, high-stakes diplomacy, peppered with insults, and played out to millions across the world in real time. It was like a painful job review carried out by a boss on a loud hailer.

Praised by many for remaining composed and reconciliatory in the face of an exercised Trump, while also criticised by some for not responding more forcefully to Tump’s accusations, reality awaits Ramaphosa back in South Africa where he and his African National Congress (ANC) face pressures on multiple fronts.

The ANC has been in an uneasy coalition – or government of national unity (GNU) – with 10 other parties for almost a year, forced into sharing power after dismal results in national elections.

There have been public fights between parties inside and outside the coalition over controversial land and healthcare legislation and attempts to push a budget through parliament which would hike taxes for the most vulnerable. That almost saw the end of the coalition earlier this year.

The economy is stagnating, crime rates are sky-high as is corruption and unemployment, public services are largely dysfunctional and infrastructure is crumbling. There also seems to be very little accountability for those who break the law.

This has meant uncomfortable and intense questions about Ramaphosa’s policies by various political parties, as well as civil society.

Meanwhile the ANC itself is unstable, as opposing factions begin jockeying for position ahead of a crucial elective conference in 2027 which is likely to see a new party leader emerge.

At the same time, Ramaphosa’s loudest critics, such as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema – who featured prominently in Trump’s discredited dossier of “evidence” that genocide was being committed against white Afrikaners in South Africa – as well as former President Jacob Zuma, have been getting louder still.

So Ramaphosa was looking for a trade deal, desperately needing the business and stability this would bring to South Africa to stimulate real and lasting economic growth and put people back to work.

Ramaphosa said as much to Trump on Wednesday – that US investment was needed to help tackle the joblessness that was a key factor in the country’s high crime rate.

The risk that the Agoa trade deal with the US may not be renewed later this year because of Trump’s isolationist worldview have made this all the more urgent. This gave South Africa duty-free access to the US market for certain goods, and is credited with having boosted South Africa’s fragile economy.

But the talk of trade was overshadowed by Trump’s Oval Office ambush over discredited claims that white South Africans were being persecuted.

However, there may still be a silver lining for Ramaphosa, and by extension his party, at least domestically.

Yes, the to-do list is impossibly long, and yes the pressure for the South African president to hold a coalition and party together that is messy and deeply uncomfortable will be waiting for him on his return. And yes the ANC is in the weakest position since it came to power 30 years ago. But it’s still in power, even if it’s sharing it.

Crucially, Ramaphosa’s conduct with Trump reminded South Africans of his diplomatic pedigree, and of his importance to the country’s rules-based order.

He is, along with Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s greatest ever alliance builder and facilitator. He was at the nerve centre of negotiating an end to the racist system of apartheid in the early 1990s, and in keeping South Africa together when many had prophesised its fatal fracture. He has stayed calm, smiled and faced down far more bitter opponents before.

More recently, he steered the country out of the bleak “state capture” years of the Zuma administration and then through the difficult Covid lockdowns. And also kept the ANC on its feet – just – when it hobbled home after the 2024 elections. He then he took a wounded ANC into coalition politics and survived as president despite opposition from within his own party.

“I believe if a snap poll was done today, we would see his personal ratings go up,” says South African editor and founder of explain.co.za Verashni Pillay.

“He excels in these high-pressure situations. He has this wealth of negotiating experience in arguably far more tense environments where there has been actual blood on the streets and imminent civil war. That’s why you saw him looking particularly relaxed. He’s masterful at diffusing tension at key moments.”

Surveys have consistently referenced the Ramaphosa Effect – the most recent from the Social Research Foundation last month which suggests that without him, the ANC would haemorrhage support even more than it already has, despite equally consistent criticism of the South African president that he is too slow and indecisive in tackling the country’s biggest problems. To a large extent, that’s still the case.

But events this week, ostensibly meant to bully, ridicule and embarrass Ramaphosa around the world, actually reminded many South Africans of what he brings to the government and the country – a constant, stable and predictable centre.

• Fact-checking Trump’s Oval Office confrontation with Ramaphosa
• Ramaphosa keeps cool during Trump’s choreographed onslaught
• On the South African road incorrectly identified as a ‘burial site’ by Trump

“I think what happened in the Oval Office has reinforced the idea of ‘If not Ramaphosa then who?'” says Pillay.

In fact, some think that what South Africans saw in the White House will actually strengthen the GNU – backed as it is by big business, which will ultimately reassure South Africans who were watching the drama.

“The meeting displayed a united front from South Africa, a public-private performance that the country has been promoting for over a decade. This for the GNU is great political theatre that translates into political capital,” says Itumeleng Makgetla, a political analyst at the University of Pretoria.

And indeed, the optics were all there. Ramaphosa facilitated a passionate rebuttal of the worst of Trump’s misinformation through interventions from his partner in the GNU – Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen – and one of South Africa’s wealthiest people, Johann Rupert – both white South Africans. If Trump understood the power of performance, so too did Ramaphosa.

“I do think the GNU comes out of this looking quite strong,” says Pillay. “The GNU happened at a really good moment for South Africa ahead of this crisis. If it was just the ANC government in the room, [Ramaphosa’s arguments] wouldn’t have landed. But being able to say that we have these parties that represent white people in government is such a strong statement.”

So what does this all mean for those on the extreme flanks of South African politics and discourse?

After the lights dimmed, Julius Malema was shown by Trump singing a song that some say calls for the murder of white farmers, although a court has ruled it is just political rhetoric. Might he reap domestic political capital from being thrust into the global spotlight?

Yes, say some. “For those in the country that are quite tired of the diatribe from President Trump and the US… this will likely strengthen Malema [and] parties like the MK because it’ll basically be saying: ‘Look, surely we can’t be bending over backwards for such individuals and lies,'” says South African political analyst Prof Kagiso “TK” Pooe from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

But Pillay disagrees.

“This will not translate into political power for Malema. Most of his top leaders have already defected to Jacob Zuma’s MK party. Things for the EFF were not looking good, even before Wednesday. Julius Malema’s brand of politics, of wanting everything to burn down, of blaming white people for everything… is entertaining but it hasn’t won votes because most South Africans don’t want their country to be burnt down.”

Having said that, there is a sizeable group of South Africans who want faster and more radical change – the election results for the MK party, a breakaway faction of the ANC, shows that.

And what of Afriforum – the Afrikaner interest group that tugged at the ears of Trump’s supporters for a number of years by lobbying and spreading right-wing propaganda, hoping to be heard?

Trump’s discredited audio-visual presentation of what he said was the systematic extermination of white Afrikaner farmers was the high-water mark of their lobbying efforts, amplified as they were in the Oval Office.

Yet, despite extraordinarily high levels of violent crime in South Africa, many are angry at the group. “In a way, I think a lot of South Africans – even those that don’t support the ANC – can finally see that there are certain people that are not for South Africa. Those people have been singled out and that’s a positive in a way,” says Prof Pooe.

“We know a large number of Afrikaans speakers are people of colour,” says Pillay. “Afriforum dealt a severe blow to the cause of Afrikaners in South Africa by racialising it.”

Afriforum’s Kallie Kriel has defended the group’s conduct on a local television channel, Newzroom Afrika: “It wasn’t Afriforum chanting genocidal calls for someone to be killed. If President Ramaphosa went there to tell the Americans that they don’t know what’s going on, they will see that as an insult because they have an embassy in South Africa and a State Department and intelligence services,” he said.

As the dust settles from Wednesday’s drama, Ramaphosa will be watching and calculating. He has consistently been at the centre of key inflection points in recent South African history when some kind of a rupture has occurred and the country has had to change course dramatically. He reads these moments so well.

Wednesday’s upheaval in Trump’s White House may not have been the economic and diplomatic reset with the US that was hoped, but could yet mark a dramatic reset for Ramaphosa and the GNU with the South African public.

• South Africa crime statistics debunk ‘white genocide’ claims – minister
• How Trump-Ramaphosa confrontation went down in South Africa
• Is there a genocide of white South Africans as Trump claims?
• Do Afrikaners want to take Trump up on his South African refugee offer?

Founded in 1600 as a trading enterprise, the English East India company gradually transformed into a colonial power.

By the late 18th Century, as it tightened its grip on India, company officials began commissioning Indian artists – many formerly employed by the Mughals – to create striking visual records of the land they were now ruling.

A Treasury of Life: Indian Company Paintings, c. 1790 to 1835, an ongoing show in the Indian capital put together by Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), features over 200 works that once lay on the margins of mainstream art history. It is India’s largest exhibition of company paintings, highlighting their rich diversity and the skill of Indian artists.

Painted by largely unnamed artists, these paintings covered a wide range of subjects, but mainly fall into three categories: natural history, like botanical studies; architecture, including monuments and scenic views of towns and landscapes; and Indian manners and customs.

“The focus on these three subject areas reflects European engagements with their Indian environment in an attempt to come to terms with all that was unfamiliar to Western eyes,” says Giles Tillotson of DAG, who curated the show.

“Europeans living in India were delighted to encounter flora and fauna that were new to them, and ancient buildings in exotic styles. They met – or at least observed – multitudes of people whose dress and habits were strange but – as they began to discern – were linked to stream of religious belief and social practice.”

Beyond natural history, India’s architectural heritage captivated European visitors.

Before photography, paintings were the best way to document travels, and iconic Mughal monuments became prime subjects. Patrons soon turned to skilled local artists.

Beyond the Taj Mahal, popular subjects included Agra Fort, Jama Masjid, Buland Darwaza, Sheikh Salim Chishti’s tomb at Fatehpur Sikri (above), and Delhi’s Qutub Minar and Humayun’s Tomb.

The once-obscure and long-anonymous Indian artist Sita Ram, who painted the tomb, was one of them.

From June 1814 to early October 1815, Sita Ram travelled extensively with Francis Rawdon, also known as the Marquess of Hastings, who had been appointed as the governor general in India in 1813 and held the position for a decade. (He is not to be confused with Warren Hastings, who served as India’s first governor general much earlier.)

The largest group in this collection is a set of botanical watercolours, likely from Murshidabad or Maidapur (in present-day West Bengal).

While Murshidabad was the Nawab of Bengal’s capital, the East India Company operated there. In the late 18th century, nearby Maidapur briefly served as a British base before Calcutta’s (now Kolkata) rise eclipsed it.

Originally part of the Louisa Parlby Album – named after the British woman who compiled it while her husband, Colonel James Parlby, served in Bengal – the works likely date to the late 18th Century, before Louisa’s return to Britain in 1801.

“The plants represented in the paintings are likely quite illustrative of what could be found growing in both the well-appointed gardens as well as the more marginal spaces of common greens, waysides and fields in the Murshidabad area during the late eighteenth century,” writes Nicolas Roth of Harvard University.

“These are familiar plants, domestic and domesticated, which helped constitute local life worlds and systems of meaning, even as European patrons may have seen them mainly as exotica to be collected.”

Another painting from the collection is of a temple procession showing a Shiva statue on an ornate platform carried by men, flanked by Brahmins and trumpeters.

At the front, dancers with sticks perform under a temporary gateway, while holy water is poured on them from above.

Labeled Ouricaty Tirounal, it depicts a ritual from Thirunallar temple in Karaikal in southern India, capturing a rare moment from a 200-year-old tradition.

By the late 18th Century, company paintings had become true collaborations between European patrons and Indian artists.

Art historian Mildred Archer called them a “fascinating record of Indian social life,” blending the fine detail of Mughal miniatures with European realism and perspective.

Regional styles added richness – Tanjore artists, for example, depicted people of various castes, shown with tools of their trade. These albums captured a range of professions – nautch girls, judges, sepoys, toddy tappers, and snake charmers.

“They catered to British curiosity while satisfying European audience’s fascination with the ‘exoticism’ of Indian life,” says Kanupriya Sharma of DAG.

Most studies of company painting focus on British patronage, but in south India, the French were commissioning Indian artists as early as 1727.

A striking example is a set of 48 paintings from Pondicherry – uniform in size and style – showing the kind of work French collectors sought by 1800.

One painting (above) shows 10 men in hats and loincloths rowing through surf. A French caption calls them nageurs (swimmers) and the boat a chilingue.

Among the standout images are two vivid scenes by an artist known as B, depicting boatmen navigating the rough Coromandel coast in stitched-plank rowboats.

With no safe harbours near Madras or Pondicherry, these skilled oarsmen were vital to European trade, ferrying goods and people through dangerous surf between anchored ships and the shore.

Company paintings often featured natural history studies, portraying birds, animals, and plants – especially from private menageries.

As seen in the DAG show, these subjects are typically shown life-size against plain white backgrounds, with minimal surroundings – just the occasional patch of grass. The focus remains firmly on the species itself.

Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG, says the the latest show proposes company paintings as the “starting point of Indian modernism”.

Anand says this “was the moment when Indian artists who had trained in courtly ateliers first moved outside the court (and the temple) to work for new patrons”.

“The agendas of those patrons were not tied up with courtly or religious concerns; they were founded on scientific enquiry and observation,” he says.

“Never mind that the patrons were foreigners. What should strike us now is how Indian artists responded to their demands, creating entirely new templates of Indian art.”

Three weeks after Prince Harry’s dramatic court loss, any likelihood of him reviving the legal battle over his personal security arrangements is narrowing by the day.

His anger and hurt at how he feels his family’s security was seemingly lessened, after he stepped back from working royal duties, has played out publicly – and earlier this month he lost his challenge at the Court of Appeal in London.

In a week’s time, the deadline passes for Prince Harry – the Duke of Sussex – to try one last go, at the Supreme Court. But that seems unlikely after he told the BBC, in his exclusive interview after losing, he had no legal options left.

And even if he were to ask for a hearing, the chances of him getting one appear slim because of what the courts have said so far.

While the prince’s complaint was about his treatment, ultimately the courts took no view on that. Instead, they ruled he had not understood how the body organising Royal Family protection worked – and how his decision to quit the UK, yet still have an “in-and-out” role in public life, was exceptional.

One former senior judge, who was not involved and spoke on background, felt the prince’s case had been “preposterous” and “hopeless” from the start and anyone else bringing such a flawed claim would have been on the receiving end of more critical language from the courts.

However, Prince Harry’s argument was always wider – saying the state had to take into account the accident of his birth which made him a target.

“I was born into this position. I was born into those risks. And they’ve only increased over time,” he said in the BBC interview.

At his first court hearing, in 2023, the prince said the UK was a place where he wanted his children “to feel at home” – but argued that can’t happen “if it’s not possible to keep them safe”.

After losing his appeal, he said he “[couldn’t] see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the UK”.

Harry’s entire legal case centred on Ravec – which authorises security for senior royals on behalf of the Home Office, and which Harry believes unfairly treated him.

So, to understand why he lost and seemingly has nowhere else to go, we first have to understand three key issues:

– Why was Ravec created, and what is its specific role?

– How did Ravec and the Home Office respond when Prince Harry quit as a front line royal?

– Why did he think this was something the courts should solve?

Ravec evolved out of a 2003 Daily Mirror stunt when one of its reporters blagged his way into a job as a Buckingham Palace footman.

It led to panic in government – and a major review concluded royal security needed a jolt.

So Ravec was born – the Royal and VIP Executive Committee (its exact name has changed down the years).

Ravec oversees security for key public figures by assessing risks from terrorism, extremism, stalkers and any other foreseeable threat such as a “fixated individual”. Unsurprisingly, there is no public list of who gets protected.

It is responsible for VIP security within England, Wales and Scotland.

The committee is funded and overseen by the Home Office because its work is on behalf of the home secretary of the day.

The Royal Household has two members on the committee, including the monarch’s private secretary. They contribute what they think is needed to protect people and key locations, such as Buckingham Palace.

The Metropolitan Police feeds information into the intelligence assessment and, ultimately provides the officers and kit to protect each “principal” – protected person.

But crucially, it’s the Home Office-appointed chair who must decide how to spend the money and justify it to government.

Part of Prince Harry’s case was heard in private, behind closed court doors, to ensure Ravec’s precise workings and its security plans remain confidential.

We learned Ravec’s decisions typically draw on a report from the Risk Management Board (RMB), a Home Office panel pulling together all the facts about risks and actual threats.

So, in the example of the prince, it is well-known that al-Qaeda supporters and racist extremists are a concern for his family. We can therefore infer that the RMB has probably tried to work out what those threats really amount to.

That’s the background. Let’s turn to how it all became such a public row, leading from the High Court to the Court of Appeal.

The critical decisions were in spring 2020 when Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, “stepped back” from being working royals.

Their choice to move first to Canada, with their baby son, raised a question for Ravec: what kind of security should the prince’s family now have, if they were no longer working royals and no longer living in the UK? What role should Ravec play in providing security, given its GB-only remit?

Court documents, while heavily redacted in places, show emails and letters were flying backwards and forwards between the Home Office, the Palace, Scotland Yard – and ultimately Prince Harry’s team.

Ravec ruled out very early on allowing the Sussexes to pay the Met to deliver their security abroad. That, it said, was not what Ravec was for. Its task was to protect working royals in GB.

The government quickly formed the view that the couple would “essentially become private citizens” living abroad – and relations began to break down on 28 February 2020.

Ravec’s then-chair, Sir Richard Mottram, told the late Queen’s private secretary Sir Edward Young that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would lose their existing Met protection.

Sir Richard wrote: “The future arrangements for [the duke and duchess] do not fit readily within this framework.”

It was that simple: the Sussexes were moving overseas, outside of Ravec’s duties.

The consequence was Prince Harry felt he was also being stripped of security when returning home – and there had been no formal Ravec meeting to decide his future protection.

In essence, he seemed to be arguing that the Royal Household’s two members of the committee – which at the time included Sir Edward – may have influenced the Home Office’s decision to reduce his security.

In his BBC interview, Harry asked “What is the Royal Household’s role [on Ravec]… if it isn’t to influence and decide what they want for the members of their household?”

But suspecting something is afoot is a world away from proving in court it really is.

In fact, the government successfully argued in court that Ravec had thought carefully and fairly about what to do.

After the duke and duchess had quit the UK, the committee carried out some threat risk assessments and then committed to decide on the duke’s security at home on a case-by-case basis.

It meant he would, in principle, potentially get at least some Met Police protection if Ravec thought the circumstances of his visit home warranted it. While living abroad, however, the royal couple would have to fund their own security.

Ravec asked Prince Harry and his private security advisers for 28 days’ notice of planned returns so it could work out what the state should provide.

This notice condition is one of the reasons why the prince says his security had been downgraded. Essentially, he feared he would get a fuller security detail if he were attending a grand royal occasion at home than if he were returning on his own private business.

The first test was when he flew in for the funeral of his grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh, in April 2021.

Prince Harry was offered personal protective security – but outside of the Ravec system. The prince regarded this to be insufficient, in light of the risks he believed he faced.

His opinion was strengthened two months later when he said he had been dangerously hounded by paparazzi after a charity event.

In evidence, his security adviser noted the paparazzi’s role in chasing Princess Diana to her death in a Paris tunnel.

The prince was convinced he had been treated unfairly and launched his Judicial Review of whether Ravec had acted unlawfully.

To win his case, Prince Harry had to land one of three legal arguments:

– Ravec had acted unlawfully, beyond the powers it had

– The committee had treated him unfairly in the way it had acted

– Its decision was so irrational that nobody else sensible could possibly have reached the same conclusion

The prince’s team did so by arguing Ravec’s policy had been overly rigid and inflexible. That failed – but there were other lines of attack:

– The committee chairman had not followed Ravec’s policies properly

– The decision over the prince’s future security had lacked transparency and consultation

– No other decision-maker could have come up with the same bespoke plan he was offered

Yet, all of these complaints were rejected by judges.

In Judicial Reviews, it’s not the role of judges to say what they would prefer to have happened. So, they never expressed a view whether Prince Harry deserved 20 or 250 more protection officers.

Mr Justice Lane, who legally demolished the prince’s case a year ago in the High Court, said Ravec’s chair and the Home Office officials who came up with the bespoke plan, had done so from “positions of significant knowledge and expertise in the highly specialist area”.

“Courts should be wary of concluding that expert adjudicators have fundamentally misunderstood how to go about their allotted tasks,” he said.

The prince’s team, who argued his military service heightened the risks he faced, said that he had been treated unfairly compared with another Ravec-protected VIP whose life had changed.

We don’t know who that was but it’s common knowledge that former prime ministers can be protected long after they have left office. That’s partly to ensure that decisions they take while in government – such as declaring war – are not affected by them worrying about their own personal future safety.

The prince appealed the judgement, going to the Court of Appeal. It ultimately ruled it was “superficial” to compare Prince Harry’s circumstances with other VIPs.

So, was there something that the courts could not see – the whiff of an “establishment stitch-up” that meant the process was unfair?

Prince Harry told the BBC: “My representative on the Ravec committee, still to this day, is the Royal Household. I am forced to go through the Royal Household and accept that they are putting my best interests forward.”

But that complaint was a legal cul-de-sac because the High Court said the prince had no evidence Ravec members had a “closed mind” or had been biased against him.

What about his complaints about reckless paparazzi following his vehicle? Did he not have a case there? In a word, no. Ravec’s job was to protect VIPs from people with “hostile intent”, not photographers breaching his privacy.

The High Court ultimately described some of his submissions as having a “distinct air of unreality”. This is wording judges use when they have been really unimpressed with what they have heard – but don’t want to sound rude.

Sir Geoffrey Vos, the senior judge who oversaw the later review in the Court of Appeal, put it differently and diplomatically.

Nobody could have been failed to be moved by Prince Harry’s concerns, he said, but he needed to hear why the prince thought Ravec was breaking the law by giving him a bespoke security plan.

“I have tried to see how and whether the Claimant’s sense of grievance translates into a legal argument,” he explained. But he couldn’t find that legal argument. And so, Prince Harry lost.

Five years of anguished legal battles came down to a difficult disagreement – but not one that the courts could find amounted to a “stitch-up”.

Joseph Kabila, the ex-president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has lashed out at the government of his successor – calling it a “dictatorship”.

The 53-year-old made a 45-minute speech live on YouTube on Friday evening from an unspecified location a day after the Senate lifted his immunity from prosecution.

DR Congo’s authorities intend to charge the former president with treason and war crimes, linking him to the Rwandan-backed M23 rebels, who have taken control of several towns in the east.

Kabila, in power between 2001 and 2019, said he had broken his silence because he felt the unity of the country was at risk.

Analysts say any trial of Kabila could further destabilise the country, which has been battling the M23 rebellion since 2012.

The government of President Félix Tshisekedi has not responded to the speech in which Kabila also set out a 12-point plan that he said could help end decades of insecurity in the mineral-rich east of DR Congo.

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Dressed in a navy suit with a Congolese flag badge pinned to his lapel, Kabila stood before a lectern in what was termed an “address to the nation” – a broadcast topped and tailed by the national anthem.

The YouTube link shared by his spokesperson has subsequently been deleted, but the recording has been shared by numerous other accounts.

Once an ally of Tshisekedi, Kabila fell out with his successor and their parties’ coalition formally ended in 2020.

The former president has been living outside the country for two years – he initially left to pursue a doctorate in South Africa.

During his speech, he hit out at “arbitrary decisions” taken by the government last month after “rumours” that he had travelled to the eastern city of Goma.

This prompted the authorities to ban his People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy (PPRD) and order the seizure of his assets.

It all “testifies to the spectacular decline of democracy in our country”, Kabila said.

During his speech, he did mention that he intended to go to Goma “in the coming days”, where he is not in danger of arrest as the city has been under control of the M23 rebels since January.

Kabila also hit out at the president for trying to undermine the constitution, at parliament for failing to hold the president to account and at the justice system for allowing itself to be “openly exploited for political end”.

He was critical of government’s handling of the economy, corruption and public debt, which he said had “skyrocketed” to more than $10bn (£7.3bn).

Kabila, a former general, was also disparaging about the government’s handling of the security situation countrywide, especially the use of pro-government militias as “auxiliaries” of the armed forces.

“The national army… has been replaced by mercenary bands, armed groups, tribal militias, and foreign armed forces that have not only demonstrated their limitations but also plunged the country into indescribable chaos.”

He mentioned that one of these armed groups was the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), an ethnic Hutu militia involved in the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and still active in eastern DR Congo.

Rwanda sees the presence of the FDLR rebels as an existential threat. Rwandan troops are currently in DR Congo in support of the M23, which is led by ethnic Tutsis who say they took arms to protect the rights of the minority group.

Kabila urged the withdrawal of “all foreign troops” from DR Congo and welcomed a recent decision by Southern African Development Community (Sadc) to pull out troop that had been deployed to help the army fight the M23.

After 18 years in power, Kabila maintained that the achievements he had made had been squandered.

“In record time – six years – we are back at square one: that of a failed, divided, disintegrated state, on the verge of implosion, and ranked high on the list of the most corrupt and heavily indebted poor countries,” he said.

Reaction to his address has been mixed, with some pointing out the irony that many of his criticisms of Tshisekedi’s administration reflected those levelled at his own government.

“The dictatorship must end, and democracy, as well as good economic and social governance, must be restored,” he said towards the end of the speech.

Kabila noted that the government had “finally resolved to sit around the same table” with M23 but felt other countrywide peace initiatives backed by the Catholic church should be pursued.

DR Congo and Rwanda, which denies accusations it backs the M23, may be edging towards a peace deal to end the fighting, which has seen hundreds of thousands of civilians forced from their homes in recent months.

The two countries signed a preliminary agreement in Washington last month and said they had agreed on a pathway to peace.

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A Ugandan activist who was arrested and held for days in Tanzania and later found at the border between the two countries has told the BBC that she was raped while in detention.

Expanding on the earlier remarks of her rights group who said she showed “indications of torture”, Agather Atuhaire alleged that people dressed in plain clothes “blindfolded” her, after which she was hit, “violently” stripped and sexually assaulted.

Atuhaire had been held incommunicado in Tanzania alongside fellow Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi, who was on Thursday found at the border with his home country.

The Tanzanian authorities have not commented.

Regional rights groups have called for an investigation and the US Department of State’s Bureau of Africa Affairs said it was deeply concerned by the reports of the two activists’ mistreatment.

“The pain was too much,” said Atuhaire, showing the BBC a scar from where she said she had been handcuffed.

She added that she was “screaming so hard” that they had to cover her mouth.

Atuhaire told the BBC about her alleged rape in graphic detail.

She said she also heard screams from Mwangi, and that those holding him had threatened to circumcise him.

The pair had gone to Tanzania to show solidarity with opposition leader Tundu Lissu, who appeared in court on Monday after being charged with treason

Mwangi recounted his alleged experience in a post on X: “We had been tortured, and we were told to strip naked and to go bathe. We couldn’t walk and were told to crawl and go wash off the blood.”

Despite being allowed into the country, Mwangi and Atuhaire were not permitted to attend the hearing and were arrested.

On Monday, President Samia Suluhu Hassan had warned that she would not allow activists from neighbouring countries to “meddle” in her country’s affairs and cause “chaos”.

• Why Samia’s hesitant reforms are fuelling Tanzanian political anger

Atuhaire was found abandoned at the border on Thursday night after being held in custody since Monday, Agora Centre for Research, the Uganda-based rights group that she leads, posted on X.

Uganda’s high commissioner to Tanzania Fred Mwesigye said Atuhaire had “safely returned home” and had been “warmly received by her family”.

Mwangi, who was earlier found abandoned on a roadside in northern Tanzania near the Kenyan border, said he had heard Atuhaire “groaning in pain” when they were held together on Tuesday.

“Any attempt to speak to each other during the night we were tortured was met with kicks and insults. We were removed from the torture location in different vehicles,” Mwangi added.

He said those who were holding them were getting orders from a “state security” official, who directed the activist to be given a “Tanzanian treatment”.

Mwangi’s disappearance had sparked widespread concern across Kenya, with his family, civil society and human rights groups staging protests and demanding his release.

On Wednesday, the Kenyan government formally protested against his detention, accusing the Tanzanian authorities of denying consular access despite repeated requests.

Earlier on Thursday, Kenya’s foreign affairs ministry issued a statement saying it had not been able to access the activist.

Regional rights groups have called for an investigation into the alleged mistreatment of the activists by the Tanzanian authorities and urged all East African countries to uphold rights treaties.

The US Department of State’s Bureau of Africa Affairs said it was deeply concerned by the reports of the two activists’ mistreatment, noting that Ms Atuhaire had been recognised by the department “in 2024 as an International Women of Courage Awardee”.

“We call for an immediate and full investigation into the allegations of human rights abuses. We urge all countries in the region to hold to account those responsible for violating human rights, including torture,” it tweeted.

• Could this be the end of the road for Tanzania’s great survivor, Tundu Lissu?
• X restricted in Tanzania after police targeted by hackers
• ‘Manhandled and choked’ – Tanzanian activist recounts abduction
• The Tanzanians searching for their grandfathers’ skulls in Germany

The last memory Han Tae-soon has of her daughter as a child is in May 1975, at their home in Seoul.

“I was going to the market and asked Kyung-ha, ‘Aren’t you coming?’ But she told me, ‘No, I’m going to play with my friends’,” recalled Ms Han.

“When I came back, she was gone.”

Ms Han would not see her daughter again for more than four decades. When they reunited, Kyung-ha was almost unrecognisable as a middle-aged American woman named Laurie Bender.

Kyung-ha had been kidnapped near her home, brought to an orphanage, then sent illegally to the US to be raised by another family, alleges Ms Han, who is now suing the South Korean government for failing to prevent her daughter’s adoption.

She is among the hundreds of people who have come forward in recent years with damning allegations of fraud, illegal adoptions, kidnapping and human trafficking in South Korea’s controversial overseas adoption programme.

No other country has sent as many children abroad for adoption, and for so long, as South Korea. Since the programme began in the 1950s, about 170,000 to 200,000 children have been adopted overseas – most of them in the West.

In March, a landmark inquiry found that successive governments had committed human rights violations with their lack of oversight, allowing private agencies to “mass export” children for profit on an industrial scale.

Experts say the findings could open the door to more lawsuits against the government. Ms Han’s is set to go to court next month.

It is one of two landmark cases. Ms Han is the first biological parent of an overseas adoptee seeking damages from the government, while in 2019, a man who was adopted in the US was the first adoptee to sue.

A government spokesman told the BBC that it “deeply sympathises with the emotional pain of individuals and families who could not find each other for a long time”.

It added that it considered Ms Han’s case with “deep regret” and that it would take “necessary actions” based on the outcome of the trial.

Ms Han, 71, told the BBC she is determined the government takes responsibility.

“I spent 44 years ruining my body and mind searching for [my daughter]. But in all that time, has anyone ever apologised to me? No one. Not once.”

For decades, she and her husband visited police stations and orphanages, put up flyers, and went on television appealing for information. Ms Han said she spent all day pounding the streets looking for her daughter “till all 10 of my toenails fell out”.

Over the years she thought she came close. In 1990, after one of her TV appeals, Ms Han met a woman who she believed could be Kyung-ha, and even took her in to live with her family for a while. But the woman eventually confessed she was not her daughter.

A breakthrough finally happened in 2019 when Ms Han signed up with 325 Kamra, a group that connects overseas Korean adoptees with their birth parents by matching their DNA.

They soon reported a match – Laurie Bender, a nurse in California. After several phone calls, she flew over to Seoul to meet Ms Han, where the two had a tearful reunion at the airport.

As they embraced, Ms Han ran her fingers through Kyung-ha’s hair. “I’ve been a hairdresser for 30 years. I can quickly tell if it’s my daughter just by feeling her hair. I had mistakenly thought I found her before, so I had to touch and feel the hair to confirm it,” she said.

The first thing she told her daughter was “I’m so sorry”.

“I felt guilty because she couldn’t find her way home when she was a child. I kept thinking about how much she must have searched for her mother… Meeting her after all those years made me realise how much she must have longed for her mother, and it broke my heart.”

“It’s like a hole in your heart has been healed, you finally feel like a complete person,” Kyung-ha said about their reunion in an earlier interview with the Associated Press. She did not respond to the BBC’s requests for an interview.

The pair eventually pieced together what happened on that day in May 1975.

Kyung-ha, who was six years old at the time, was playing near her home when she was approached by a strange woman claiming to know her mother. Kyung-ha was told her mother “didn’t need” her any more and was taken to a train station.

After taking a train ride with the woman, Kyung-ha was abandoned at the final stop, where she was eventually picked up by police officers and placed in an orphanage. Soon, she was flown to the US to be adopted by a couple in Virginia.

Years later, checks revealed she was given false papers stating she was an abandoned orphan whose parents were unknown.

“It’s like you’ve been living a fake life and everything you know is not true,” Kyung-ha said previously.

Her case was far from an isolated one.

South Korea’s overseas adoption programme began in the ashes of the 1950-53 Korean War, when it was a deeply impoverished country with an estimated 100,000 orphaned and displaced children.

At that time, few families were willing to adopt non-biological children, and the government began an overseas adoption programme, billed as a humanitarian effort.

The programme was handled entirely by private adoption agencies. While they were under government oversight, over time these agencies gained significant autonomy through laws.

As their power grew, so did the number of children being sent abroad, rising in the 1970s and peaking in the 1980s. In 1985 alone, more than 8,800 children were sent overseas.

There was a massive demand from the West – with declining birth rates and fewer babies to adopt at home, families began seeking children elsewhere.

Photos from that era show planes heading to Western countries filled with Korean children, with swaddled babies strapped to seats – what the truth and reconciliation commission’s inquiry called the “mass transportation of children like cargo”.

The report alleges little care was taken of these children during these long flights. In one case it cited from 1974, a lactose-intolerant child was fed milk in transit and subsequently died upon arrival in Denmark.

Critics of the programme have long questioned why so many children needed to be sent overseas at a time when South Korea was already experiencing rapid economic growth.

A 1976 BBC Panorama documentary, which featured South Korea as one of several Asian countries sending children to the West, quoted an observer describing the situation as “out of control” and “almost like a trade in children… flowing from Asia into Europe and North America”.

According to the truth and reconciliation report, foreign adoption agencies set quotas for children, which Korean agencies willingly fulfilled.

It was a profitable business – the lack of government regulation allowed the Korean agencies to charge large amounts and demand hidden fees termed as “donations”.

Some of these children may have been obtained by unscrupulous means, with parents like Ms Han alleging their children were kidnapped. In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of homeless or unattended children were rounded up and put in orphanages or welfare centres as part of a national campaign to “clean up the streets” of South Korea.

Other parents were told their babies had fallen sick and died, when they were actually alive and taken to adoption agencies. Agencies also did not obtain proper consent from birth mothers to take their children for adoption, according to the truth and reconciliation report.

The report also stated that adoption agencies deliberately falsified information in adoption records to cut corners and quickly meet the demand for children.

Lost children who were found without any identity documents would be made to appear, in paperwork, as if they had been abandoned and put up for adoption.

If a child intended for adoption had died or was reclaimed by their birth parents, another child would be swapped in and assigned the original child’s identity. This allowed agencies to avoid refunding adoption fees and expedite the adoption process.

Decades on, this has created immense difficulties for many overseas adoptees trying to track down their biological parents.

Some have wrong or missing information in their adoption records, while others have discovered they were given entirely false identities.

“We are victims of state violence but there is no trace of this – literally. This lack of documents must not make us victims for the second time,” said Han Boon-young, co-founder of an overseas adoptee rights group campaigning for greater access to birth information.

“This is a human rights issue. There were kidnappings, falsified documents – all of which were examples of violations committed during the inter-country adoption process.

“It is really necessary to move towards reconciliation, that we recognise these experiences, and that the people who committed these violations be held responsible.”

But some of the key players continue to stay silent or deny wrongdoing.

The BBC contacted Bu Chung-ha, who in the 1970s served as chairman of Holt International, South Korea’s largest adoption agency.

Holt is at the centre of numerous allegations of fraud and illegal adoptions, and the subject of two lawsuits so far, including Ms Han’s.

In a brief reply, Mr Bu denied that the agency had sent abroad any children wrongly identified as orphans during his tenure. Any parents alleging their children were kidnapped “did not lose their children, they abandoned them”, he said.

The current management of Holt International has yet to respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Experts say the responsibility lay not only with the private agencies but also with the state.

“Adoption agencies exploited the system, and the government turned a blind eye – allowing illegal practices to take root,” said Dr Lee Kyung-eun, an international law scholar at Seoul National University.

“The government was the captain, and the agencies rowed the boat,” said Shin Pil-sik, a researcher on transnational adoption at Seokyeong University, who added that this structure enabled both sides to deflect accountability.

Dr Shin said the state was not a passive observer- it actively shaped adoption policy, setting annual quotas for overseas placements and even on occasion halted some adoptions.

An Associated Press news investigation last year found successive Korean governments had rewritten laws to remove minimal safeguards and judicial oversight, fit their laws to match American ones to make children adoptable, and allowed foreign families to adopt Korean children quickly without ever visiting the country.

While the government billed the programme as a humanitarian effort, observers say it also served to strengthen ties with Western countries.

A 1984 government document obtained by the BBC stated that the official goals of the adoption policy included not only the welfare of children but also “the promotion of future national strength and people-to-people diplomacy”.

When asked about the state’s role in past adoption practices, South Korea’s health and welfare ministry said they were “continuing efforts to strengthen state responsibility” in the system and that it plans to promote adoptions that comply with international standards.

In 2012, the government revised adoption laws to tighten screening of potential adoptive parents, and to track birthparent data and birth information better.

It has also enacted reforms to the adoption system ensuring that overseas adoptions are minimised and that all adoptions would be handled by the government instead of private agencies. The changes will take effect in July.

Meanwhile, overseas adoptions have declined. In the late 1980s, overseas adoptions dropped sharply, before stabilising in the 1990s and dropping again in the 2010s. Only 79 children were adopted abroad in 2023, according to the latest available data.

But as South Korea begins to address this dark chapter in its past, adoptees and birth parents like Ms Han continue to struggle with their trauma.

After their initial reunion, Ms Han and Kyung-ha have struggled to maintain a close connection.

Not only do they live on opposite sides of the world, her daughter has forgotten most of her Korean while Ms Han knows little English.

They keep in touch over texts occasionally, and Ms Han spends two hours every day practising her English by writing phrases in an exercise book.

But it isn’t enough for Ms Han.

“Even though I have found my daughter, it doesn’t feel like I’ve truly found her. All I know is where she is, but what good is that, if we can’t even communicate?

“My entire life has been ruined… no amount of money will ever make up for what I’ve lost.”

Carrie and Boris Johnson have announced the birth of their fourth child, a girl.

Poppy Eliza Josephine Johnson was born on 21 May, Mrs Johnson wrote in an Instagram post accompanied by a series of images of the baby.

“I can’t believe how pretty and tiny you are,” she said. “Feel so incredibly lucky. We are all totally smitten.”

The new baby joins their sons, Wilfred and Frank, and daughter Romy. Poppy – or “Pop Tart”, as she has been nicknamed – is the former prime minister’s ninth child.

Pictures of the new arrival included Poppy lying in a bassinet with their other children standing over her, as well as being held by Carrie, 37, and Boris Johnson, 60, in hospital.

“Not sure I’ve slept a minute since you were born as can’t stop looking at how completely lovely you are,” Mrs Johnson wrote.

She also thanked the maternity team at University College London Hospital in Euston, north London, “and particularly to Asma and Patrick who have looked after me so well through all my pregnancies”.

The Johnson’s first two children – Wilfred and Romy – were born while the couple were in Downing Street during the Covid pandemic.

Frank was born in July 2023, their first after Boris Johnson left office.

Mrs Johnson, a former communications director for the Conservative Party, hinted that their fourth child would be their last, describing Poppy as a “final gang member”.

She said her other children were “utterly delighted” with the addition to the family, noting Romy was “desperate for a little sister”.

The former Tory leader has four grown-up children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, and another daughter from an affair.

He was prime minister from July 2019 until his resignation in September 2022.

Eighteen people were injured in a knife attack at the main railway station in the German city of Hamburg on Friday evening, police said.

Hamburg police said on Saturday that four of the victims who had sustained life-threatening injuries were in a stable condition.

Officers arrested a 39-year-old German woman at the scene of the attack, which took place at about 18:00 local time (16:00 GMT) on Friday.

Police said there was “very concrete evidence” of mental illness in the suspect, and no evidence the attack was politically motivated.

The woman remains in police custody and is scheduled to appear in court on Saturday.

The attack happened between platforms 13 and 14 – which are accessible via a busy main road – while a train was on one of the platforms.

The suspect began stabbing people waiting for the train, but was stopped by the “rapid intervention” of two people on the platform as well as emergency services, police said.

The victims range in age from 19 to 85. Seven people were slightly injured, seven seriously injured, and four critically injured, police said.

The critically injured – a 24-year-old female, 24-year-old male, 52-year-old female, and an 85-year-old female – were stable as of Saturday.

On Saturday police said there was still no evidence of a political motive for the attack.

“Rather, there is now very concrete evidence of a mental illness on the part of the suspect,” they said, adding that the woman did not appear to have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

An investigation is under way.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the attack was “shocking” and thanked the emergency services for “their rapid assistance”.

Pictures from the scene on Friday showed emergency service personnel and vehicles and barriers that seem to be hiding the injured from public view.

A video on social media appears to show the suspect with her hands behind her back being escorted out of the station platform by officers who put her in a police vehicle.

Hamburg’s central station is one of Germany’s busiest transport hubs. It is often crowded during Friday rush hour.

This is the latest in a series of violent attacks in Germany in recent months.

In January, a two-year-old boy and a 41-year-old man were killed in a stabbing in a park in Aschaffenburg, with several others hurt.

A Spanish tourist was stabbed just a month later at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial.

Last December, six people were killed and hundreds were injured after a car drove into a crowd at a Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg.

The suspects in these previous attacks were migrants, which has led Germany to tighten border control checks and saw immigration become a key issue for voters during the country’s federal elections in February.

A decade ago, a portrait of the British monarch caused a row in Canadian politics. Now, the King is being invited to deliver the Speech from the Throne. What’s changed?

In 2011, shortly after forming a majority Conservative government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper caused a national uproar when he sought to emphasise Canada’s ties to the British monarchy. In one example, he replaced two artworks by a Quebec painter with a portrait of the Queen.

Some rebuked the gesture as being out of touch with modern times. Canada has, throughout its 157-year-old history, sought increasing independence from the British monarchy, while still remaining a part of the Commonwealth.

When Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau succeeded Harper four years later, the Queen’s portrait went down, the Quebec paintings, back up.

Fast forward to 2025, and a paradoxical shift has occurred in Canada’s relationship with the Crown. In a transparent show of Canada’s sovereignty and independence against threats from US President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Mark Carney – a Liberal – has invited King Charles the III to open the 45th Canadian parliament.

• King Charles uses symbols to show support for Canada
• The strategy behind Carney’s invite to the King

The move is “a huge affirmation and statement about the uniqueness of Canada and its traditions,” Justin Vovk, a Canadian royal historian, told the BBC – “a theatrical display that is meant to show what makes Canadians separate from Americans” and not, as Trump has often repeated, a “51st state”.

Both countries are former British colonies, but America’s founding fathers took a different path and severed all formal connections to the Crown nearly 250 years ago.

Canada’s separation from the monarchy has been more gradual, and its ties have never been completely broken. Canada’s parliamentary system is modelled after Britain’s Westminster system. The British monarch is still formally the head of state, but their duties are often carried out by their Canadian representative, called the governor general.

Loyalty to the Crown was seen as important to Canada’s politicians in the 19th Century who wanted to maintain separation from the US, said Canadian royal historian and commentator Carolyn Harris.

That later changed in the 1960s, as Quebec – Canada’s majority French-speaking province – began to assert its own distinct identity and threatened separation. This led to an era of politicians like Lester B Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau who worked to untangle Canada from its British colonial past.

In 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau repatriated Canada’s constitution, giving full legislative power to the federal government and the provinces, and removing it from British parliament.

Ms Harris noted that Canada remained a constitutional monarchy throughout these periods. What fluctuated, however, was how much the prime minister of the day chooses to embrace that connection.

Carney’s invitation to King Charles III signals that his government will be one that is much more supportive of the Crown, Mr Vovk said, marking “a very different tone” from previous Liberals.

A British monarch has not delivered Canada’s throne speech since 1977, and has not opened a brand new session of parliament since 1957, making the King’s upcoming visit a truly rare occasion.

It comes at a consequential time for Canada.

Carney heavily campaigned on standing up to Trump, after the US president spent months undermining Canada’s sovereignty by saying it would be better off as a US state.

Trump also imposed a series of tariffs that have threatened Canada’s economic stability, given that the US is its largest trade partner by far.

When announcing the visit last month, Carney called it “a historic honour that matches the weight of our times”.

He added that the King’s visit “clearly underscores the sovereignty of our country”.

Both historians, Mr Vovk and Ms Harris, noted that the bulk of Canada’s modern population is indifferent to the British monarchy. Some are even critical of it.

The coronation of King Charles III in 2023 made way for fresh scrutiny of the Crown’s historic mistreatment of indigenous people in Canada, and questions on whether the new monarch will move towards reconciliation.

Quebec politicians are also still calling for Canada to cut ties with the monarchy. On Friday, the separatist Bloc Québécois party said it will again seek to scrap the need for elected officials to swear allegiance to the King.

Some Canadians will be intrigued by the pomp and pageantry of the King’s visit, Mr Vovk said, but its chief purpose is to send a political message from Canada to the world.

It is also a way for Prime Minister Carney to improve the relationship with Trump, who is famously a fan of the British monarchy and its history.

“Strengthening the relationship with the monarchy puts a stamp on legitimacy that transcends individual parties and the current political climate,” Mr Vovk said. “Politicians come and go, but the monarchy has always remained.”

It also works to tie Canada closer to Europe – a key objective of Prime Minister Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England, who has spoken about the need for Canada to find new allies as it navigates its changing relationship with the US.

The visit is notable for the Crown, too.

It will be the King’s first to Canada as reigning monarch. He and the Queen had intended to visit last year, but cancelled their plans due to his cancer diagnosis.

The palace has promised a throne speech that will “mark a significant moment between the Head of State and the Canadian people”.

And while it will be a short trip – the King and Queen will arrive Monday morning and depart Tuesday evening – the palace said they hope the trip will be “an impactful one”.

“A lot of people ask me: ‘Father Moses, how can I increase my manliness to absurd levels?'”

In a YouTube video, a priest is championing a form of virile, unapologetic masculinity.

Skinny jeans, crossing your legs, using an iron, shaping your eyebrows, and even eating soup are among the things he derides as too feminine.

There are other videos of Father Moses McPherson – a powerfully-built father of five – weightlifting to the sound of heavy metal.

He was raised a Protestant and once worked as a roofer, but now serves as a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in Georgetown, Texas, an offshoot of the mother church in Moscow.

ROCOR, a global network with headquarters in New York, has recently been expanding across parts of the US – mainly as a result of people converting from other faiths.

In the last six months, Father Moses has prepared 75 new followers for baptism in his church of the Mother of God, just north of Austin.

“When my wife and I converted 20 years ago we used to call Orthodoxy the best-kept secret, because people just didn’t know what it was,” he says.

“But in the past year-and-a-half our congregation has tripled in size.”

During the Sunday liturgy at Father Moses’s church, I am struck by the number of men in their twenties and thirties praying and crossing themselves at the back of the nave, and how this religion – with traditions dating back to the 4th century AD – seems to attract young men uneasy with life in modern America.

Software engineer Theodore tells me he had a dream job and a wife he adored, but he felt empty inside, as if there was a hole in his heart. He believes society has been “very harsh” on men and is constantly telling them they are in the wrong. He complains that men are criticised for wanting to be the breadwinner and support a stay-at-home wife.

“We are told that’s a very toxic relationship nowadays,” Theodore says. “That’s not how it should be.”

Almost all the converts I meet have opted to home-school their offspring, partly because they believe women should prioritise their families rather than their careers.

Father John Whiteford, an archpriest in the ROCOR from Spring, north of Houston, says home-schooling ensures a religious education and is “a way of protecting your children”, while avoiding any talk about “transgenderism, or the 57 genders of the month or whatever”.

Compared to the millions of worshippers in America’s evangelical megachurches, the numbers of Christian Orthodox are tiny – only about one percent of the population. That includes Eastern Orthodoxy, as practised across Russia, Ukraine, eastern Europe and Greece, and the Oriental Orthodox from the Middle East and Africa.

Founded by priests and clergy fleeing the Russian Revolution in 1917, ROCOR is seen by many as the most conservative Orthodox jurisdiction in the US. Yet this small religious community is a vocal one, and what’s unfolding within it mirrors broader political shifts, especially following President Donald Trump’s dramatic pivot toward Moscow.

The true increase in the number of converts is hard to quantify, but data from the Pew Research Centre suggests Orthodox Christians are 64% male, up from 46% in 2007.

A smaller study of 773 converts appears to back the trend. Most recent newcomers are men, and many say the pandemic pushed them to seek a new faith. That survey is from the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), which was established by Russian monks in Alaska in the late 18th Century and now has more than 700 parishes, missions, communities, monasteries, and institutions in the US, Canada and Mexico which identify as Russian Orthodox.

Professor Scott Kenworthy, who studies the history and thought of Eastern Orthodox Christianity – particularly in modern Russia – says his OCA parish in Cincinnati “is absolutely bursting at the seams”.

He’s attended the same church for 24 years and says congregation numbers remained steady until the Covid lockdown. Since then, there has been constant flow of new inquirers and people preparing to be baptised, known as catechumens.

“This is not just a phenomenon of my own parish, or a few places in Texas,” Prof Kenworthy says, “it is definitely something broader.”

The digital space is key in this wave of new converts. Father Moses has a big following online – when he shares a picture of a positive pregnancy test on his Instagram feed he gets 6,000 likes for announcing the arrival of his sixth child.

But there are dozens of other podcasts and videos presented by Orthodox clergy and an army of followers – mainly male.

Father Moses tells his congregation there are two ways of serving God – being a monk or a nun, or getting married. Those who take the second path should avoid contraception and have as many children as possible.

“Show me one saint in the history of the Church who ever blessed any kind of birth control,” Father Moses says. As for masturbation – or what the church calls self-abuse – the priest condemns it as “pathetic and unmanly”.

Father Moses says Orthodoxy is “not masculine, it is just normal”, while “in the West everything has become very feminised”. Some Protestant churches, he believes, mainly cater for women.

“I don’t want to go to services that feel like a Taylor Swift concert,” Father Moses says. “If you look at the language of the ‘worship music’, it’s all emotion – that’s not men.”

Elissa Bjeletich Davis, a former Protestant who now belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church in Austin, is a Sunday school teacher and has her own podcast. She says many converts belong to “the anti-woke crowd” and sometimes have strange ideas about their new faith – especially those in the Russian Church.

“They see it as a military, rigid, disciplinary, masculine, authoritarian religion,” Elissa says. “It’s kind of funny. It’s almost as if the old American Puritans and their craziness is resurfacing.”

Buck Johnson has worked as a firefighter for 25 years and hosts the Counterflow podcast.

He says he was initially scared to enter his local Russian Orthodox Church as he “looks different, covered in tattoos”, but tells me he was welcomed with open arms. He was also impressed the church stayed open throughout the Covid lockdown.

Sitting on a couch in front of two huge TV screens at his home in Lockhart, he says his newfound faith is changing his view of the world.

“Negative American views on Russia are what worry me,” Buck says. He tells me the mainstream, “legacy” media presents a distorted picture of the invasion of Ukraine.

“I think there’s a holdover from the boomer generation here in America that lived through the Cold War,” Buck says, “and I don’t quite grasp why – but they say Russia’s bad.”

The head of the Russian Church in Moscow, Patriarch Kirill, has doggedly backed the invasion of Ukraine, calling it a Holy War, and expressing little compassion for its victims. When I ask Archpriest Father John Whiteford about Russia’s top cleric, who many see as a warmonger, he assures me the Patriarch’s words have been distorted.

Footage and photographs of Putin quoting Bible verses, holding candles during services in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and stripping down to his swim trunks to plunge into icy water at Epiphany, seem to have struck a chord. Some – in America and other countries – see Russia as the last bastion of true Christianity.

Nearly a decade ago, another Orthodox convert turned priest from Texas, Father Joseph Gleason, moved from America to Borisoglebskiy, a village four hours’ drive north of Moscow, with his wife and eight children.

“Russia does not have homosexual marriage, it does not have civil unions, it is a place where you can home-school your kids and – of course – I love the thousand-year history of Orthodox Christianity here,” he told a Russian video host.

This wispy-bearded Texan is in the vanguard of a movement urging conservatives to relocate to Russia. Last August, Putin introduced fast-track shared values visa for those fleeing Western liberalism.

Back in Texas, Buck tells me he and his fellow converts are turning their backs on instant gratification and American consumerism.

“We’re thinking of things long term,” Buck says, “like traditions, love for your family, love for you community, love for neighbours.

“I think that orthodoxy fits us well – and especially in Texas.”

Andriy Portnov’s murder in a Madrid suburb may have been shocking, but it has not exactly triggered an outpouring of grief in Ukraine.

The controversial former official had just dropped his children off at the American School when he was shot several times in the car park.

The image of his lifeless body lying face down in gym kit marked the end of a life synonymous with Ukrainian corruption and Russian influence.

Ukraine’s media have been discussing the 51-year-old’s frequent threats to journalists, as well as his huge influence under the country’s last pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych.

“A man who called for the killing of political opponents suddenly got what he wanted from others,” observed reporter Oleksandr Holubov. News website Ukrayinska Pravda even called him “the devil’s advocate”.

Rare words of restraint came from Portnov’s once political rival Serhiy Vlasenko, an MP, who said: “You can’t kill people. When discussing someone’s death, we must remain human.”

Portnov was controversial and widely disliked. The motives for his murder may seem evident, but his death has still left unanswered questions.

Before entering Ukrainian politics, Portnov ran a law firm. He worked with then-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko until 2010, before defecting to Yanukovych’s camp when he won the election.

“It was a big story of betrayal,” remembers Ukrainian journalist Kristina Berdynskykh. “Because Tymoshenko was a pro-Western politician, and Yanukovych pro-Russian.”

The adviser became the country’s first deputy head of the Presidential Office and set up a national criminal code in 2012. For him, his critics say, his ascent was less about politics, and more about power and influence.

“He was just a good lawyer, everyone knew he was very smart,” Kristina tells me.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Ukraine inherited a judicial system in desperate need of reform. Mykhailo Zhernakov, a legal expert and head of the Dejure Foundation believes Portnov remoulded it in order for the government to cover up illegal schemes, and to mask Russian attempts to control the country.

“He was the kingpin, mastermind and architect of this corrupt legal system designed to serve the pro-Russian administration at the time,” he says.

Over a decade, Portnov would sue journalists who wrote negative stories about him through the courts and judges he controlled. His attempts to control the judicial system would lead to him being sanctioned by the US.

At the time, Washington accused the adviser of placing loyal officials in senior positions for his own benefit, as well as “buying court decisions”.

Portnov later pursued activists who took part in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution, which toppled Viktor Yanukovych from power, and forced him to escape the country to Russia.

“He used sexual threats,” says Oksana Romaniuk who remembers her and other journalists’ interactions with Portnov well.

As director of the Institute of Mass Information, she monitors free speech in Ukraine.

Whenever a damning report was published, the reaction was familiar and consistent. “When people exposed his corruption, he accused them of fake news,” she says.

“Even when journalists had documents and testimonies backing up the allegations, it was impossible to win the lawsuits in court. It was impossible to defend yourself. It was a rotten system.”

Andriy Portnov eventually settled in Moscow after his old boss Yanukovych fled in 2014. Investigative reporter Maksym Savchuk subsequently investigated his ties to Moscow, as well as his extensive property portfolio there.

“He responded with words I don’t want to quote, derogatory ones about my mother,” he remembers. “It’s a trait of his character; he is a very vindictive person.”

Even after leaving Ukraine, Portnov still tried to influence Ukrainian politics by taking control of pro-Kremlin TV channel NewsOne.

He returned in 2019, only to flee again with the full-scale invasion in 2022.

The irony of Portnov eventually settling in Spain and sending his children to a prestigious American school has not been lost on many.

Alongside the undisguised delight in Portnov’s death, there has been endless speculation over who was responsible.

“It could have been the Russians because he knew so many things,” suggests legal expert Mykhailo Zhernakov.

“He was involved in so many shady Russian operations it could be them or other criminal groups. He managed to annoy a lot of people,” he says.

Despite the motives being clearer on this side of the border, Ukrainian security sources appear to be trying to distance themselves from the killing.

Kyiv has previously carried out assassinations in Russian-occupied territory and in Russia itself, but not in Spain.

Some Spanish media reports suggest his murder was not political, but rather over “economic reasons or revenge”.

“You can imagine how many people need to be interrogated in order to narrow down the suspects,” thinks Maskym Savchuk. “Because this person has a thousand and one enemies.”

In Ukraine, Portnov is seen as someone who helped Russia form the foundations for its invasion. A once general dislike of him has only been intensified since 2022.

Despite this, Mykhailo Zhernakov hopes his death is also an opportunity for wider judicial reforms.

“Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean his influence has,” he warns. “Because many of the people he appointed or helped get jobs are still in the system.”

North Korea has detained three shipyard officials over an accident during the launch of a new warship on Wednesday, state media say.

Parts of the 5,000-tonne destroyer’s bottom were crushed during the launch ceremony, tipping the vessel off balance.

An investigation into the incident, which North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un described as a “criminal act”, is ongoing.

KCNA, North Korea’s official news agency, identified those detained as the chief engineer of the northern Chongjin shipyard where the destroyer was built, as well as the construction head and an administrative manager.

The report said that the three were “responsible for the accident”.

On Friday, KCNA said the manager of the shipyard, Hong Kil Ho, had been summoned by law enforcers.

Satellite images showed the vessel lying on its side covered by large blue tarpaulins, and a portion of the vessel appeared to be on land.

North Korea’s state media did not mention any casualties or injuries at the time, downplaying the damage.

KCNA reported that there were no holes on the ship’s bottom – contrary to initial reports.

“The hull starboard was scratched and a certain amount of seawater flowed into the stern section,” the agency said.

Kim said on Thursday the accident was caused by “absolute carelessness, irresponsibility and unscientific empiricism”.

He added that those who made “irresponsible errors” would be dealt with at a plenary meeting next month.

It is not clear what punishment they might face, but the authoritarian state has a woeful human rights record.

It is uncommon for North Korea to publicly disclose local accidents – though it has done this a handful of times in the past.

This particular accident comes weeks after North Korea unveiled a similar 5,000-tonne destroyer, the Choe Hyon.

Kim had called that warship a “breakthrough” in modernising North Korea’s navy and said it would be deployed early next year.

Russia has intensified strikes on Ukraine, with the highest number of drones and missiles launched in a single night yet.

At least 12 people, including three children, were killed and dozens injured, Ukrainian officials said.

The attack was the second large-scale assault on the country in 48 hours, coming a day after the Ukrainian capital Kyiv suffered one of the heaviest assaults since the start of the Russian invasion.

Saturday’s overnight strikes come as Russia ignores calls for a ceasefire.

Rescuers were working in more than 30 cities and villages after the “massive” strike, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement on Sunday morning.

“Russia is dragging out this war and continues to kill every day,” he said.

“The world may go on for a weekend, but the war continues, despite weekends and weekdays. This cannot be ignored.”

Ukraine is again urging its allies to apply more pressure on Moscow to engage in a ceasefire.

“Without really strong pressure on the Russian leadership, this cruelty cannot be stopped,” he added, calling for fresh sanctions.

Zelensky said “America’s silence will only encourage Putin” – an apparent effort to exert pressure on US President Donald Trump who has said the Russian leader is interested in ending the war.

Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and Moscow currently controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory.

This includes Crimea – Ukraine’s southern peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.

In terms of the numbers of drones and missiles launched, Saturday night was the highest yet.

Russia is able not only to just manufacture them at a faster rate, but they are also evolving. Shahed drones are now being packed with more explosives and improved technology to evade detection.

Ukraine’s Air Force said that since 20:40 on Saturday local time (17:40 GMT), Russia had carried out strikes using 367 missiles of various types, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and drones.

The air force said it had shot down 45 cruise missiles and neutralised 266 UAVs, with most regions in Ukraine affected and hits recorded in 22 locations.

Deaths were reported in several regions.

Russia’s defence ministry said it had inflicted damage on targets including military airfields, ammunition depots and electric warfare stations, claiming damage across 142 areas.

According to Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs, Ihor Klymenko, 13 regions were attacked, with more than 70 people injured, 80 residential buildings damaged, and 27 fires recorded.

He called it a “combined, ruthless strike aimed at civilians”.

Of the 12 people killed, three were children aged eight, 12 and 17 in the Zhytomyr region, Ukraine’s state emergencies service DSNS said.

Klymenko said they were from the same family and their parents were in hospital.

In the Kyiv region, four people were killed and 16 injured, including three children, DSNS said.

In Kyiv, local officials reported 11 injuries, multiple fires and damage to residential buildings, including a dormitory.

Hundreds of people headed to the city’s deep metro stations for shelter. The din of drones filled the air, occasionally punctuated by the booms of air defences, or the moments of impact. Several fires were reported.

A BBC colleague messaged to say a block of flats had been destroyed, just a five minute drive from where she lived.

The strikes come as the capital marks its annual Kyiv Day holiday.

In Russia, the defence ministry said 110 Ukrainian drones were destroyed and intercepted over 12 Russian regions and the Crimea peninsula between midnight and 0700 local time.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported that 12 drones heading towards the capital were shot down.

He added that emergency services crews were deployed to assess damage caused by falling drone debris.

In the Tula region, just south of Moscow, drone wreckage crashed in the courtyard of a residential building, smashing windows in a number of apartments, local governor Dmitriy Milyaev said.

No-one was injured, he added.

Sunday is also the third and final day of a major prisoner of war exchange between the two sides, and after this weekend, there is even less hope it will lead to further co-operation.

On Friday, Ukraine and Russia each handed over 390 soldiers and civilians in the biggest prisoner exchange since Russia launched its full-scale assault in February 2022.

On Saturday, Zelensky announced that another 307 Ukrainian prisoners had returned home as part of an exchange deal with the Kremlin.

And on Sunday, Ukraine and Russia each confirmed 303 of their soldiers had returned home – bringing the total over the three days to 1,000 prisoners each.

The swap follows the first face-to-face talks between the two sides in three years, which took place in Turkey.

Earlier this week, Trump and Putin had a two-hour phone call to discuss a US-proposed Ukraine ceasefire deal.

Trump said he believed the call had gone “very well”, and added that Russia and Ukraine will “immediately start” negotiations toward a ceasefire and “an end to the war”.

However, Putin has only said Russia would work with Ukraine to craft a “memorandum” on a “possible future peace”, and has not accepted a 30-day ceasefire.

Founded in 1600 as a trading enterprise, the English East India company gradually transformed into a colonial power.

By the late 18th Century, as it tightened its grip on India, company officials began commissioning Indian artists – many formerly employed by the Mughals – to create striking visual records of the land they were now ruling.

A Treasury of Life: Indian Company Paintings, c. 1790 to 1835, an ongoing show in the Indian capital put together by Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), features over 200 works that once lay on the margins of mainstream art history. It is India’s largest exhibition of company paintings, highlighting their rich diversity and the skill of Indian artists.

Painted by largely unnamed artists, these paintings covered a wide range of subjects, but mainly fall into three categories: natural history, like botanical studies; architecture, including monuments and scenic views of towns and landscapes; and Indian manners and customs.

“The focus on these three subject areas reflects European engagements with their Indian environment in an attempt to come to terms with all that was unfamiliar to Western eyes,” says Giles Tillotson of DAG, who curated the show.

“Europeans living in India were delighted to encounter flora and fauna that were new to them, and ancient buildings in exotic styles. They met – or at least observed – multitudes of people whose dress and habits were strange but – as they began to discern – were linked to stream of religious belief and social practice.”

Beyond natural history, India’s architectural heritage captivated European visitors.

Before photography, paintings were the best way to document travels, and iconic Mughal monuments became prime subjects. Patrons soon turned to skilled local artists.

Beyond the Taj Mahal, popular subjects included Agra Fort, Jama Masjid, Buland Darwaza, Sheikh Salim Chishti’s tomb at Fatehpur Sikri (above), and Delhi’s Qutub Minar and Humayun’s Tomb.

The once-obscure and long-anonymous Indian artist Sita Ram, who painted the tomb, was one of them.

From June 1814 to early October 1815, Sita Ram travelled extensively with Francis Rawdon, also known as the Marquess of Hastings, who had been appointed as the governor general in India in 1813 and held the position for a decade. (He is not to be confused with Warren Hastings, who served as India’s first governor general much earlier.)

The largest group in this collection is a set of botanical watercolours, likely from Murshidabad or Maidapur (in present-day West Bengal).

While Murshidabad was the Nawab of Bengal’s capital, the East India Company operated there. In the late 18th century, nearby Maidapur briefly served as a British base before Calcutta’s (now Kolkata) rise eclipsed it.

Originally part of the Louisa Parlby Album – named after the British woman who compiled it while her husband, Colonel James Parlby, served in Bengal – the works likely date to the late 18th Century, before Louisa’s return to Britain in 1801.

“The plants represented in the paintings are likely quite illustrative of what could be found growing in both the well-appointed gardens as well as the more marginal spaces of common greens, waysides and fields in the Murshidabad area during the late eighteenth century,” writes Nicolas Roth of Harvard University.

“These are familiar plants, domestic and domesticated, which helped constitute local life worlds and systems of meaning, even as European patrons may have seen them mainly as exotica to be collected.”

Another painting from the collection is of a temple procession showing a Shiva statue on an ornate platform carried by men, flanked by Brahmins and trumpeters.

At the front, dancers with sticks perform under a temporary gateway, while holy water is poured on them from above.

Labeled Ouricaty Tirounal, it depicts a ritual from Thirunallar temple in Karaikal in southern India, capturing a rare moment from a 200-year-old tradition.

By the late 18th Century, company paintings had become true collaborations between European patrons and Indian artists.

Art historian Mildred Archer called them a “fascinating record of Indian social life,” blending the fine detail of Mughal miniatures with European realism and perspective.

Regional styles added richness – Tanjore artists, for example, depicted people of various castes, shown with tools of their trade. These albums captured a range of professions – nautch girls, judges, sepoys, toddy tappers, and snake charmers.

“They catered to British curiosity while satisfying European audience’s fascination with the ‘exoticism’ of Indian life,” says Kanupriya Sharma of DAG.

Most studies of company painting focus on British patronage, but in south India, the French were commissioning Indian artists as early as 1727.

A striking example is a set of 48 paintings from Pondicherry – uniform in size and style – showing the kind of work French collectors sought by 1800.

One painting (above) shows 10 men in hats and loincloths rowing through surf. A French caption calls them nageurs (swimmers) and the boat a chilingue.

Among the standout images are two vivid scenes by an artist known as B, depicting boatmen navigating the rough Coromandel coast in stitched-plank rowboats.

With no safe harbours near Madras or Pondicherry, these skilled oarsmen were vital to European trade, ferrying goods and people through dangerous surf between anchored ships and the shore.

Company paintings often featured natural history studies, portraying birds, animals, and plants – especially from private menageries.

As seen in the DAG show, these subjects are typically shown life-size against plain white backgrounds, with minimal surroundings – just the occasional patch of grass. The focus remains firmly on the species itself.

Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG, says the the latest show proposes company paintings as the “starting point of Indian modernism”.

Anand says this “was the moment when Indian artists who had trained in courtly ateliers first moved outside the court (and the temple) to work for new patrons”.

“The agendas of those patrons were not tied up with courtly or religious concerns; they were founded on scientific enquiry and observation,” he says.

“Never mind that the patrons were foreigners. What should strike us now is how Indian artists responded to their demands, creating entirely new templates of Indian art.”

As a footballer, Jay Emmanuel-Thomas seemed destined for greatness. But a drug-smuggling conviction has left his career and reputation in tatters. How did things unravel so dramatically for a player once tipped for the top?

Hailed by legendary Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger as a footballer who could “play anywhere”, Emmanuel-Thomas was marked out early on as having elite potential.

Imposing, technically gifted and surprisingly agile, the striker appeared to have the world at his feet.

But a career that promised so much at Arsenal faltered and saw him spend years flitting between the second and third tiers of English football.

In 2020 he moved to play in Scotland and was still plying his trade north of the border when, on 18 September, he was arrested at his home in Gourock, near Glasgow.

Sixteen days earlier, Border Force officers had stopped two women at London Stansted Airport and found drugs in their cases.

It was not a minor haul; they were staring at cannabis with a street value of £600,000.

How did it get there? The evidence soon led detectives to Emmanuel-Thomas.

Wind back a decade and a half, and things were very different.

It is 26 May 2009, and Arsenal’s latest batch of academy talents can barely contain their excitement.

The young prospects, including Jack Wilshere and Francis Coquelin, have just won the FA Youth Cup.

One player in particular has stood out: their 16-year-old captain, Emmanuel-Thomas, who has scored in every round of the competition.

“These young men have a very bright future indeed,” remarked one commentator.

But despite going on to make five first-team appearances, it was not quite to be for Emmanuel-Thomas.

He was shipped out on several loans before leaving the north London club for Ipswich Town.

It was a move that excited supporters in Suffolk, who were keen to see what the former Arsenal starlet could produce.

However, 71 games and eight goals later, Emmanuel-Thomas had not quite made the mark fans hoped for, and he moved to Bristol City in a player exchange deal.

Here, he helped the Robins secure promotion to the Championship and became something of a cult hero, scoring 21 goals in his first season.

A move to Queens Park Rangers followed, with subsequent loan spells at MK Dons and Gillingham.

But in 2019, Emmanuel-Thomas accepted a transfer to a Thai-based team that would alter the course of his life.

It is believed he was tempted into the country’s drugs underworld while playing for PTT Rayong, a club that folded in the same year.

Despite later moves to an Indian side and several Scottish outfits, including Aberdeen, Emmanuel-Thomas never shook off the criminal connections he made.

By the time he took a six-month contract at Greenock Morton, a 40-minute drive from Glasgow, the game was almost up.

As he lined up for them against Queens Park on 14 September, he would have surely known the law was about to catch up with him.

The women arrested at Stansted were his 33-year-old girlfriend, Yasmin Piotrowska, and her friend Rosie Rowland, 28.

Emmanuel Thomas, by then 33, appeared in court charged with orchestrating the attempted importation of drugs, and was sacked by his club.

Detectives discovered he had duped Ms Piotrowska, from north-west London, and Ms Rowland, from Chelmsford, into travelling to Thailand with the promise of £2,500 in cash and an all-expenses-paid trip.

Their job? To bring home two suitcases each, filled with what they were assured was gold, Chelmsford Crown Court heard.

They flew business class from Bangkok, landing in Essex via Dubai.

Unknown to them, they were smuggling in cannabis with a street value of £600,000, vacuum-packed inside the four cases.

The pair were stopped and arrested by Border Force officers, before being charged with drug importation offences.

With the pair in custody, and Emmanuel-Thomas later remanded, police probed how the drugs made it to the UK.

They soon found the player was the intermediary between suppliers in Thailand and dealers in the UK, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA).

With the footballer’s encouragement, the women had also made a near-identical trip in July, having been made similar promises of cash and a lavish holiday.

On his way to custody, Emmanuel-Thomas even told NCA officers: “I just feel sorry for the girls.”

His first court hearing in September was told he carried out “extensive research” into flights and directions, including which airports the women had been going to.

David Philips, a senior NCA investigator, said “organised criminals like Emmanuel-Thomas” used persuasion and payment to get people to do their dirty work.

“But the risk of getting caught is very high and it simply isn’t worth it,” he added.

During several court appearances, Emmanuel-Thomas, of Cardwell Road, Gourock, strenuously denied attempting to import cannabis.

However, he changed his plea to guilty at the start of May and restrictions on reporting this were lifted on Wednesday.

Charges against both Ms Piotrowska and Ms Rowland were dropped after the prosecution revealed they had been tricked by Emmanuel-Thomas.

It followed what David Josse KC described as a “very thorough investigation”.

Emmanuel-Thomas appeared via video link from HMP Chelmsford at his latest court hearing.

When he returns to court for sentencing, on a date still to be confirmed, it will not be his first time in the spotlight.

But it will be for very different reasons to the day he lifted that trophy aloft in 2009.

It was supposed to be a defining, catalytic moment for French society.

Horrific, but unmissable. Unignorable.

The seaside town of Vannes, in southern Brittany, had carefully prepared a special venue and a separate overflow amphitheatre for the occasion.

Hundreds of journalists were accredited for a process that would, surely, dominate headlines in France throughout its three-month duration and force a queasy public to confront a crime too often shunted to the sidelines.

Comparisons were quickly made with – and expectations tied to – last year’s Pelicot mass rape trial in southern France and the massive global attention it garnered.

Instead, the trial of France’s most prolific known paedophile, Joel Le Scouarnec – a retired surgeon who has admitted in court to raping or sexually assaulting 299 people, almost all of them children – is coming to an end this Wednesday amid widespread frustration.

“I’m exhausted. I’m angry. Right now, I don’t have much hope. Society seems totally indifferent. It’s frightening to think [the rapes] could happen again,” one of Le Scouarnec’s victims, Manon Lemoine, 36, told the BBC.

Ms Lemoine and some 50 other victims, stung by an apparent lack of public interest in the trial, have formed their own campaign group to pressure the French authorities, accusing the government of ignoring a “landmark” case which exposed a “true laboratory of institutional failures”.

The group has questioned why a parliamentary commission has not been set up, as in other high-profile abuse cases, and spoken of being made to feel “invisible”, as if “the sheer number of victims prevented us from being recognised.”

Some of the victims, most of whom had initially chosen to testify anonymously, have now decided to reveal their identities in public – even posing for photos on the courthouse steps – in the hope of jolting France into paying more attention and, perhaps, learning lessons about a culture of deference that helped a prestigious surgeon to rape with impunity for decades.

The crimes for which Le Scouarnec is on trial all occurred between 1998 and 2014.

“It’s not normal that I should have to show my face. [But] I hope that what we’re doing now will change things. That’s why we decided to rise up, to make our voices heard,” said Ms Lemoine.

So, what has gone wrong?

Were the horrors too extreme, the subject matter too unremittingly grim or simply too uncomfortable to contemplate?

Why, when the whole world knows the name of Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot, has a trial with significantly more victims – child victims abused under the noses of the French medical establishment – passed by with what feels like little more than a collective shudder?

Why does the world not know the name Joel Le Scouarnec?

“The Le Scouarnec case is not mobilising a lot of people. Perhaps because of the number of victims. We hear the disappointment, the lack of wide mobilisation, which is a pity,” said Maëlle Nori, from feminist NGO (All of Us).

Some observers have reflected on the absence in this case of a single, totemic figure like Gisèle Pelicot, whose public courage caught the public imagination and enabled people to find some light in an otherwise bleak story.

Others have reached more devastating conclusions.

“The issue is that this trial is about sexual abuse of children.

There’s a virtual on this topic globally, but particularly in France. “We simply don’t want to acknowledge it,” Myriam Guedj-Benayoun, a lawyer representing several of Le Scouarnec’s victims, told me.

In her closing arguments to the court, Ms Guedj-Benayoun condemned what she called France’s “systemic, organised silence” regarding child abuse.

She spoke of a patriarchal society in which men in respected positions like medicine remained almost beyond reproach and pointed to “the silence of those who knew, those who looked the other way, and those who could have – should have – raised the alarm”.

The depravity exposed during the trial has been astonishing – too much for many to stomach.

The court in Vannes has heard in excruciating detail how Le Scouarnec, 74, wallowed in his paedophilia, carefully detailing each child rape in a succession of black notebooks, often preying on his vulnerable young patients while they were under anaesthetic or recovering from surgery.

The court has also been told of the retired surgeon’s growing isolation, and of what his own lawyer described as “your descent into hell”, in the final decade before he was caught, in 2017, after abusing a neighbour’s six-year-old daughter.

By the end, alone in a filthy house, drinking heavily and ostracised by many of his relatives, Le Scouarnec was spending much of his time watching violent images of child rape online, and obsessing over a collection of lifelike child-sized dolls.

“I was emotionally attached to them… They did what I wanted,” Le Scouarnec told the court in his quiet monotone.

A few blocks from the courthouse, in an adapted civic hall, journalists have watched the proceedings unfold on a television screen. In recent days, the seats have begun to fill up and coverage of the trial has increased as it moves towards a close.

Many commentators have noted how the Le Scouarnec trial, like the Pelicot case, has exposed the deep institutional failings which enabled the surgeon to continue his rapes long after they could have been detected and stopped.

Dominique Pelicot had been caught “upskirting” in a supermarket in 2010 and his DNA quickly linked to an attempted rape in 1999 – a fact that, astonishingly, wasn’t followed up for a whole decade.

At Le Scouarnec’s trial a succession of medical officials have explained – some ashamedly, others self-servingly – how an overstretched rural healthcare system chose, for years, to ignore the fact that the surgeon had been reported by America’s FBI in 2004 after using a credit card to pay to download videos of child rapes on his computer.

“I was advised not to talk about such and such a person,” said one doctor who’d tried to sound the alarm.

“There is a shortage of surgeons, and those who show up are welcomed like the messiah,” explained a hospital director.

“I messed up, I admit it, like the whole hierarchy,” a different administrator finally conceded.

Another connection between the Pelicot and Le Scouarnec cases is what they’ve both revealed about our understanding – or lack of understanding – of trauma.

Without warning or support, Gisèle Pelicot had been abruptly confronted by police with the video evidence of her own drugging and rapes.

Later, during the trial, some defence lawyers and other commentators sought to minimise her suffering by pointing to the fact that she’d been unconscious during the rapes – as if trauma only exists, like a wound, when its scar is visible to the naked eye.

In the Le Scouarnec case, French police appear to have gone about searching for the paedophile’s many victims in a similarly brusque manner, summoning people for an unexplained interview and then informing them, out of the blue, that they’d been listed in the surgeon’s notebooks.

The reactions of Le Scouarnec’s many victims have varied widely. Some have simply chosen not to engage with the trial, or with a childhood experience of which they have no memory.

For others, news of the abuse has affected them profoundly.

“You’ve entered my head, it’s destroying me. I’ve become a different person – one I don’t recognise,” said a victim, addressing Le Scouarnec in court.

“I have no memories and I’m already damaged,” said another.

“It turned me upside down,” a policeman admitted.

And then there is a different group of people who – not unlike Gisèle Pelicot – have found that knowledge of their abuse has been revelatory, enabling them to make sense of things they had not previously understood about themselves or their lives.

Some have connected their childhood abuse to a general sense of unhappiness, or poor behaviour, or failure in life.

For others, the links have been much more specific, helping to explain a litany of mysterious symptoms and behaviours, from a fear of intimacy to repeated genital infections and eating disorders.

“With my boyfriend, every time we have sex, I vomit,” one woman revealed in court.

“I had so many after-effects from my operation. But no-one could explain why I had this irrational fear of hospitals,” said another victim, Amélie.

Some have described the trial itself as being like a group therapy session, with victims bonding over shared traumas which they’d previously believed they were suffering alone.

“This trial is like a clinical laboratory involving 300 victims. I sincerely hope it will change France. In any case it will change the victims’ perception of trauma and traumatic memory,” said the lawyer, Ms Guedj-Benayoun.

Despite her concerns about the lack of public interest, Manon Lemoine said the trial had helped the victims “to rebuild ourselves, to turn a page. We lay out our pain and our experiences and we leave it behind [in the courtroom]. So, for me, really, it was liberating.”

Having confessed to his crimes, Le Scouarnec will inevitably receive a guilty verdict and will almost certainly remain in prison for the rest of his life.

Two of his victims took their own lives some years before the trial – a fact which he acknowledged in court with the same penitent but formulaic apology that he’s offered to everyone else.

Meanwhile, some activists remain hopeful that the case will prove to be a turning point in French society.

“Compared to the Pelicot trial… we can see we don’t talk very much about the Le Scouarnec case. We need to unite. We have to do this, otherwise nothing will happen, and the Le Scouarnec trial will have served no purpose. I was also a victim as a child. We’re obliged to react and to organise ourselves,” said Arnaud Gallais, a child rights campaigner and founder of the Mouv’Enfants NGO.

A more wary assessment came from the lawyer, Ms Guedj-Benayoun.

“Now, there is a very important standoff between those who want to denounce child sexual violence and those who want to cover it up, and this standoff is taking place today in this trial. Who will win?” she wondered.

A man slept outside in a car park overnight in Kenya with his wife and infant son in January, consumed by confusion and disbelief.

The family, refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), had been expecting a flight to the US for resettlement in just hours’ time.

But after US President Donald Trump suspended the US refugee programme just two days before the family’s scheduled departure, the man was told their flight to America was abruptly cancelled – less than 24 hours before take-off.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” the man, who asked to go by the name of Pacito to protect his identity, told the BBC.

He had already moved his family from their home, sold his furniture and most of their belongings, and prepared for a new life in America. They remain in Kenya, which is a safer prospect than the DRC, where they fled conflict.

They represent just three of the roughly 120,000 refugees who had been conditionally approved to enter the US, but who now wait in limbo due to the refugee pause.

Trump’s move signalled a major change in the approach that was followed by successive US leaders. Under former President Joe Biden, over 100,000 refugees came to the US in 2024 – the highest annual figure in nearly three decades.

Since entering office in January, Trump has moved quickly to deliver on his campaign promise of an “America first” agenda that has involved dramatically restricting routes by which migrants can come to the US.

The effort has also included an ambitious deportation programme under which people have been deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador against a judge’s orders, as well as revoking visas from over a thousand university students, and offering illegal immigrants a sum of $1,000 each to “self-deport”.

The White House has defended its actions by suggesting that many of those being forced from the country are either violent criminals or threaten America’s interests.

But exceptions to the policies have been made for a select few.

The president signed an executive order in February that opened the refugee pathway exclusively to Afrikaners – white South Africans who he claimed were victims of “racial discrimination”.

A plane carrying 59 of them landed at an airport just outside Washington DC earlier this month, in a ceremonious greeting that included the deputy secretary of state.

“It’s not fair,” Pacito commented. “There are 120,000 refugees who went through the whole process, the vetting, the security, the medical screenings. We’ve waited for years, but now these (Afrikaners) are just processed in like three months.”

The situation has left Pacito feeling stuck. Since he has sold all of the equipment that he needed to work in his field of music production, for the past few months he has struggled to find odd jobs to earn money for his family. “It’s kind of hard,” he said.

• Trump ambushes S African leader with claim of Afrikaners being ‘persecuted’
• Is there a genocide of white South Africans as Trump claims?
• ‘I didn’t come here for fun’ – Afrikaner defends refugee status in US

Trump has further justified his decision to accept Afrikaners as refugees in the US because he says they face “a genocide” – a message that has been echoed by Elon Musk, his South African-born close ally.

Such claims have circulated for years, though are widely discredited, and have been denied by South Africa.

However, the call has taken on new animus – particularly among right-wing groups in the US – ever since a law was passed in South Africa in January that allowed the government to seize land from white landowners “when it is just and equitable and in the public interest”. The post-apartheid-era law was meant to address frustrations around South Africa’s disproportionate land ownership; the country’s white population is roughly 7% but owns roughly 72% of farmland.

Though South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said no land has been taken under the new law, days after it was passed, Trump ordered the US to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the country. A diplomatic feud followed.

The fraying relationship was laid bare on Wednesday during a tense White House meeting between the pair. Trump ambushed Ramaphosa on live TV with claims of white “persecution” – an allegation Ramaphosa emphatically rejected.

Analysts have described the broader foreign policy of Trump’s second term as isolationist, with numerous moves made to cut foreign aid and to disentangle the US from foreign conflicts, in addition to reducing immigration.

Trump has also terminated tens of billions of dollars in global aid contracts – including funds that supported lifesaving HIV/Aids programmes in South Africa. He has justified the cuts by saying his team identified fraud within the aid spending.

The moves appear in stark contrast to the White House’s decision to fast-track the arrival of white South Africans – a fact that has been critiqued by refugee advocacy groups.

“Every case of protection should be based on credible evidence of persecution, and the central question here is about fairness and equal treatment under the law,” Timothy Young from the non-profit organisation Global Refuge told the BBC.

“So if one group can access humanitarian pathways, then so should Afghan allies, persecuted religious minorities and the thousands of other families who face serious threats and who meet the legal criteria for refugee status,” Mr Young said.

• How a US freeze upended global aid in a matter of days
• Trump to end protected status for Afghans

Among its other moves, the Trump administration has chosen not to renew the temporary protected status for Afghans in the US, saying “Afghanistan has had an improved security situation” and a “stabilising economy”. They now face deportation.

South Africa does not release crime figures based on race, but the latest figures revealed that 6,953 people were murdered in the country between October and December 2024.

Of these, 12 were killed in farm attacks. Of the 12, one was a farmer, usually white, while five were farm dwellers and four were employees, who were likely to have been black.

Meanwhile, in the DRC, thousands of civilians have been killed by armed militias in recent years, and nearly 100,000 more displaced, according to UN figures.

Pacito fled the DRC on foot in 2016, recalling “guns everywhere I looked” at the time, and “no peace”. He said family members of his wife had been killed.

Among the others who see the US as an increasingly unlikely place to resettle as refugees is the Hammad family, who are from Gaza but are now living in Egypt.

“After what happened with Trump, I think it will be impossible,” Amjad Hammad told the BBC.

He and his family had applied for the US’s green card lottery in 2024 but found out in May they had been denied.

He expressed confusion about Trump’s concern for the plight of white South Africans over and above other groups.

“What are the Palestinians facing, if the people in South Africa are facing a genocide?” he asked.

More than 53,000 people have been killed across Gaza since 7 October 2023, when Israel launched a campaign to destroy Hamas – the Palestinian armed group that launched a cross-border attack on southern Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

The confusion voiced by Mr Hammad is similar to the views of Pacito, whose hopes of resettling in the US were dashed in January.

Since then, he has been left effectively homeless in Nairobi, drifting from place to place to wherever someone will accept him and his family for a few days.

“Sometimes we get food. Sometimes we don’t,” he said. “We’ve been struggling very badly.”

The policy changes on the US side give him little hope that he will be accepted by Trump, but the alternative of heading back across Africa to his home country is unimaginable. “I can’t go back,” he said.

Lucy Connolly’s 51-word online post in the wake of the Southport killings led her to jail and into the centre of a row over free speech.

For some, the 31-month jail term imposed for inciting race hate was “tyrannical”, while one commentator said Connolly was a “hostage of the British state”, and another that she was “clearly a political prisoner”.

Court of Appeal judges, however, this week refused to reduce her sentence.

Asked about her case in Parliament, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said sentencing was “a matter for the courts” and that while he was “strongly in favour of free speech”, he was “equally against incitement to violence”.

Rupert Lowe, the independent MP for Great Yarmouth, said the situation was “morally repugnant” and added: “This is not the Britain I want to live in.”

Others said her supporters wanted a “right to be racist”.

In July last year, prompted by a false rumour that an illegal immigrant was responsible for the murder of three girls at a dance workshop in Southport, Connolly posted online calling for “mass deportation now”, adding “set fire to all the… hotels [housing asylum seekers]… for all I care”.

Connolly, then a 41-year-old Northampton childminder, added: “If that makes me racist, so be it.”

At the time she had about 9,000 followers on X. Her message was reposted 940 times and viewed 310,000 times, before she deleted it three and a half hours later.

In October she was jailed after admitting inciting racial hatred.

Three appeal court judges this week ruled the 31-month sentence was not “manifestly excessive”.

Stephen O’Grady, a legal officer with the Free Speech Union (FSU), said the sentence seemed “rather steep in proportion to the offence”.

His organisation has worked with Connolly’s family since November and funded her appeal.

Mr O’Grady said Connolly “wasn’t some lager-fuelled hooligan on the streets” and pointed to her being a mother of a 12-year-old daughter, who had also lost a son when he was just 19 months old.

He said there was a “difference between howling racist abuse at somebody in the street and throwing bricks at the police” and “sending tweets, which were perhaps regrettable but wouldn’t have the same immediate effect”.

Connolly’s case was also “emblematic of wider concerns” about “increasing police interest in people’s online activity”, Mr O’Grady said.

The FSU had received “a slew of queries” from people who were “very unsure” about “the limits of what they can they can say online”, he said, and who feared “the police are going to come knocking on the door”.

“There’s an immense amount of police overreach,” he added.

He cited the example of a retired special constable detained after challenging a pro-Palestine supporter online, a case the FSU took on.

Responding to Mr O’Grady’s claim, a National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesperson said that Article 10 of the Human Rights Act “protects a person’s right to hold opinions and to express them freely” and that officers received training about the act.

They added: “It remains imperative that officers and staff continue to receive training commensurate with the demands placed upon them.”

After the appeal was dismissed, Connolly’s husband, Conservative town councillor Raymond Connolly, said she was “a good person and not a racist” and had “paid a very high price for making a mistake”.

Her local Labour MP, Northampton South’s Mike Reader, said he had “big sympathy” for Connolly and her daughter, but there was no justification for accusing the police of “overreach”.

He said: “I want the police to protect us online and I want the police to protect us on the streets and they should be doing it equally.”

It was a “fallacy” and “misunderstanding of the world” if people did not “believe that the online space is as dangerous for people as the streets,” he added.

“We’re all attached to our phones; we’re all influenced by what we see, and I think it’s right that the police took action here.”

In his sentencing remarks, Judge Melbourne Inman said Connolly’s offence was “category A” – meaning “high culpability” – and that both the prosecution and her own barrister agreed she “intended to incite serious violence”.

For Reader, this showed “they weren’t arguing this was a silly tweet and she should be let off – her own counsel agreed this was a serious issue”.

At her appeal, Connolly claimed that while she accepted she intended to stir up racial hatred, she always denied trying to incite violence.

But Lord Justice Holroyde said in a judgement this week the evidence “clearly shows that she was well aware of what she was admitting”.

Sentencing guidelines for the offence indicate a starting point of three years’ custody.

While the prosecution argued the offence was aggravated by its timing, “particularly sensitive social climate”, the defence argued the tweet had been posted before any violence had started, and that Connolly had “subsequently attempted to stop the violence after it had erupted”.

The judgement also highlighted other online posts from Connolly that the judges said indicated her “view about illegal immigrants”.

Four days before the Southport murders, she responded to a video shared by far-right activist Tommy Robinson showing a black man being tackled to the ground for allegedly performing a sex act in public.

Connolly posted: “Somalian, I guess. Loads of them,” followed by a vomiting emoji.

On 3 August, responding to an anti-racism protest in Manchester, she wrote: “I take it they will all be in line to sign up to house an illegal boat invader then. Oh sorry, refugee.

“Maybe sign a waiver to say they don’t mind if it’s one of their family that gets attacked, butchered, raped etc, by unvetted criminals.”

The FSU said she was likely to be eligible for release from August, after serving 40% of her sentence.

Some, including Mr O’Grady, argued her jail term was longer than punishments handed to criminals perceived to have committed “far worse” crimes.

Reform UK’s Mark Arnull, the leader of West Northamptonshire Council, said it was not for him “to pass comment on sentences or indeed discuss individual cases”.

But he added: “It’s relatively easy to understand why constituents in West Northamptonshire question the proportionality of Lucy’s sentence when they see offenders in other high-profile and serious cases walk free and avoid jail.”

The issue for writer and activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu was that “those who have committed worse crimes” should “spend more time in jail, not less time for Lucy Connolly”.

Dr Mos-Shogbamimu added: “It’s not ‘freedom of speech without accountability’. She didn’t tweet something that hurt someone’s feelings; she tweeted saying someone should die.”

In her view, those making Connolly a “flag-bearer or champion” for free speech were asking for “the right to be racist”.

Free speech advocate Mr O’Grady said “no-one is arguing for an unfettered ‘right’ to incite racial hatred”.

Connolly’s case was about “proportionality”, he added, and “the sense that online speech is increasingly being punished very harshly compared to other offending… such as in-person violent disorder”.